I know I am getting ahead of myself because I haven’t even shared our venue with you yet, but I wanted to talk about the decor that didn’t happen. When I first started looking at wedding porn, there were so many things that I wanted. Looking at all those delicious weddings can be completely overwhelming and definitely set up unrealistic expectations for me. I finally had to quit cold turkey. Not before I completely fell in love with Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling, though!

Image via Fete Event Planning

Image via Luna Bazaar

Isn’t this just completely gorg!?! Not having (yet) spent a lot of time obsessing over weddings, I thought it was the most original idea I had ever seen and had to have it at my wedding. As time went on, the list of things I HAD to have at the wedding grew longer and longer. I think we are now up to 27 things I have to have at the wedding, which is entirely too many.

Sadly, I realized with our venue, hanging the lanterns would be almost logistically impossible. There is zero room in the budget to hire someone to do it. I suppose I could always convince friends and family to hang them the day of the wedding, but it could take hours and I want them to enjoy the day as well. Besides, I don’t even know if the venue would allow us to hang things from the ceiling. I am definitely hiring a DoC, but there are so many other projects I am hoping she will set up that this one just fell off the priority list. It is still nice to look at pictures and dream, though.

Image via Heather Gilson / One Love Photo

Image via Big Wedding Tiny Budget / Photo credit: NE Sound

Image via To Suit Your Fancy

Sigh.

Of all of summer’s traditions — watermelon-eating, picnics, Fourth of July fireworks — one of my favorites is watching free and excellent performances of Shakespeare in Central Park. (And we New Yorkers aren’t the only ones privy to such high-brow no-cost entertainment. Theater companies across the country perform outdoor productions of the Bard’s work, and many of them don’t charge an admission fee either.) 

The plays being performed in Manhattan this summer are All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. They are two of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” — ones with characters whose motivations can be hard to understand, with plots that don’t resolve quite as satisfyingly as his others. More to the point of this blog, they’re two plays in which good women love bad men — and accept and forgive them, even after they’ve proven themselves to be lousy womanizers. 

In All’s Well, the humble daughter of a physician falls in love with a wealthy man from an elite family — and she is so besotted with him that she overlooks all his failings, even his cruel rejection of her. Part of the reason this play is a “problem” is because the typical audience member asks herself constantly what’s wrong with the girl. Can’t she see the dude is a good-for-nothing schmuck? Who cares if he’s rich and hot and he has fancy friends — he’s also a huge jackass who treats her terribly! 

Measure for Measure depicts a man who might seem familiar to anyone who’s been keeping up with the headlines of recent months — a government figure so drunk with power that he sexually assaults a woman and thinks he can get away with it. Watching the play on Tuesday night, it was hard for me not to think about politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger. And yet after the bad guy, Angelo, is publicly disgraced by the woman, who happens to be a nun, a loving woman is willing to take him back. 

In neither play does Shakespeare give us much psychological insight into either of the female characters I describe.

So, I wonder if you have any thoughts about why they continue to love men who are so abhorrent — or about why women like Silda Spitzer and Catherine Greig stand by their fallen men. It’s one thing to stick with a guy who is going through a hard time, or who has been unfairly fired or otherwise maligned by society, but it’s quite another to support someone who has, say, hired a prostitute to cheat on you, or has been accused of murder. Some people are saints, sure, but not that many of us are. Do women like these have a domestic form of Stockholm Syndrome? Does starting over simply seem too hard for them?

Maybe it was this song that started it for me. (Lord knows I’ve had an obsession with Sesame Street for as long as I’ve been alive.)

Video via YouTube

Or maybe it’s a classic case of “middle child syndrome,” but for some reason I’ve always felt like I had to be different from my peers. Growing up in a family of three girls (plus a cousin who stayed by my side 24/7), standing out was a daily concern.

I really thought this was behind me—I mean, once I grew up and left home it wasn’t an issue anymore. There wasn’t a need to act different, because I was myself.

So why do I feel like I have to be unique again? Ever since I started planning our wedding, I’ve felt my inner middle child tugging at my sleeve and whispering, “You need to be unique…be different.” It’s starting to get on my nerves.

I’ve started caring about things that really shouldn’t be an issue. Here’s a great example: the color of my bridesmaids’ dresses. I had two rules: no taffeta and no purple. I’ll admit that I don’t really like taffeta, so no issue there. But do I have anything against the color purple? No. Absolutely not. I kind of love purple. But in the last year or so, I’ve been to about four or five weddings that featured purple bridesmaids’ dresses. I just wanted to be different. But now that I’m looking for dresses, I’m beginning to think that purple might be a good choice. There are so many gorgeous dresses! Sue me, I like purple bridesmaids’ dresses! So why can’t I just let go of this whole “different” thing?!

After all, what’s so different about getting married? People get married all the time! But when you look deeper, past the dresses and the flowers and any other design detail, the wedding is different because it’s ours. Because it’s the most important day of our relationship so far. Because it’s the day we get to celebrate our relationship with all our friends and family.