So You're EnGAYged, A Gay Wedding Blog

Engaged people are supposed to get cold feet, right?  Nervous about making a huge commitment, worried about what it all means, yes?  But since Lynn and I did our committing in Boston last summer, we’re just throwing a big, special party, where we re-say all of the important stuff in a place where our family and friends can hear it.  The decision is made, and we’re in it for life, so that pressure is off.

What I’ve got now is itchy feet.  We’re a month away from the wedding, and there are TONS of little details that I could be working on.  Could be.  But for some reason I just can’t seem to focus.  I think a lot of the problem is that everything is sort of small—we need to get our rings engraved, and the engagement rings cleaned.  I wanted to make hair appointments to try out different styles, even though our hair won’t be done by the same person as the one practicing.  I need to buy mini clothespins and something to wear to our rehearsal, and hand out assignments to helpful relatives.  But so far all I can do is stare at other peoples’ wedding pictures and wonder how ours is possibly going to come together in the next 30 days.

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Now that the rehearsal dinner location has been agreed upon (thankfully), we move on to the next step—planning the menu!

Is this something that is addressed elsewhere and I’ve just managed to miss it?  Do most restaurants come out with some sort of plan if you tell them you’re having a rehearsal dinner at their space?  Or does everyone else just have no set budget for their rehearsal dinners and hope for the best?

We’re having the dinner at the Martin Fierro Restaurant in Naples.  Lynn and her mom went there a few weeks ago to sample the food, which they both said was marvelous, and that the staff didn’t blink and eye when she said exactly who was marrying whom.  So that’s good.   I’m happy to support a South American restaurant in that part of the state (the other side of Florida is swimming in them—the west coast not so much) and also to show our guests what sort of things people eat in Uruguay, since none of them have ever been there.

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Budgeting for a same-sex wedding has been interesting.  In some ways it’s exactly how I expect budgeting for any wedding would be—we set our priorities, try to find deals, and cut corners on the things that don’t matter to us while putting more towards the things that do.  But there have been a few places where having two women has made it confusing.  Lynn’s mom, for example, has decided that Lynn is the groom.  Or at least that her family is responsible for the traditional ‘groom’ stuff.  Which is very generous, because now she’s offering to pay for the rehearsal dinner and all sorts of other little things on top of the money she initially gave us to help cover the wedding costs.  So we’ve had the pleasure of telling her that she doesn’t have to pay for anything extra and that if we go over we’ll be paying for it ourselves.

image by me

That ‘paying for anything extra ourselves’ part has been the ruling factor in our wedding budgeting.  Our families gave us a set amount specifically for the wedding, and another amount for the honeymoon. Of course, spending that money has been easy—and quick!  Almost all of it went to the food, venue, and photographer (and the honeymoon fund to plane tickets).  But everything else we need to pay for ourselves, so we’ve been hunting for deals.  We’re not exactly debt-free at the moment between a new house, student loans and some lingering credit card debt, so the plan is to keep our contribution low enough that we’ll have the cash on hand on the wedding day to cover everything.

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Budgeting for a same-sex wedding has been interesting.  In some ways it’s exactly how I expect budgeting for any wedding would be—we set our priorities, try to find deals, and cut corners on the things that don’t matter to us while putting more towards the things that do.  But there have been a few places where having two women has made it confusing.  Lynn’s mom, for example, has decided that Lynn is the groom.  Or at least that her family is responsible for the traditional ‘groom’ stuff.  Which is very generous, because now she’s offering to pay for the rehearsal dinner and all sorts of other little things on top of the money she initially gave us to help cover the wedding costs.  So we’ve had the pleasure of telling her that she doesn’t have to pay for anything extra and that if we go over we’ll be paying for it ourselves.

image by me

That ‘paying for anything extra ourselves’ part has been the ruling factor in our wedding budgeting.  Our families gave us a set amount specifically for the wedding, and another amount for the honeymoon. Of course, spending that money has been easy—and quick!  Almost all of it went to the food, venue, and photographer (and the honeymoon fund to plane tickets).  But everything else we need to pay for ourselves, so we’ve been hunting for deals.  We’re not exactly debt-free at the moment between a new house, student loans and some lingering credit card debt, so the plan is to keep our contribution low enough that we’ll have the cash on hand on the wedding day to cover everything.

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There I was, happily planning the wedding without a care in the world (I find the budget constraint sort of a pleasant challenge since I know that if we go over we probably still have some time to drum up a little extra cash to cover it).  Every decision I made Lynn liked, and the few that she didn’t were easy for me to compromise on.  Perfection!  Why do so many couples talk about wedding stress? This is a big, fun, party we’re planning here!
And then.  Then I threw out the idea of getting invitations for our rehearsal dinner.  I had figured that it would be a family picnic for our wedding party, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc.  Lynn’s family has a cabin called Bear Hammock in the middle of a national park (it was her great-great-great grandparents’ homestead, so the government couldn’t take it when they made the area into a park) which is both beautiful and really really cool, so I was thinking bbq, guitars, campfire, and general merriment.  But Lynn’s mom was not having it.  Too many people, too little space, no, no, no.

So I tried again—there’s a state park that we love on the site of a funky little religious cult from the turn of the century (they thought we lived inside a hollow earth and that the heavens were in the center, among other things).  We’d originally wanted the wedding there but between accessibility issues and rental costs it didn’t work.  Why not move the family picnic there?  No, no, no.  Still too many people, too much stuff to coordinate, too far away.  No.

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Invitation wording has been harder than I expected for some reason.  We’re just ordering our invites online (they aren’t something that falls high on our priority list so we’re going for simple, cheap, and already addressed since both of us have terrible handwriting), so I’ve been trawling through option after option for wording suggestions.

They seem to fall into three categories: super-religious—

“We request the honour of your presence as we celebrate the love we’ve found and are united for eternity in Christ”

Way too cutesy-

“Our course is set, it’s full speed ahead; we’re sailing toward, the day we’ll be wed!”,

or fairly straightforward (we’re going that route).

The difficulty has been deciding how to actually word a few key points. First: parents. Both of our sets of parents are divorced.  Mine have each remarried, while Lynn’s mother has a long-time partner and her father is currently single.  Some of them are contributing to the wedding financially, and all of them will be present to support us and help out, so we want to acknowledge them.  But listing all of those names is ridiculous, so we’ve opted for the generic-but-inclusive ‘together with their parents’ line.

Then there is the murky so-called etiquette code of what you are being invited to, exactly.  I read something that told me an invitation requesting “the honour of your presence” is for a wedding in a church, which isn’t the case for us, so it’ll be “the pleasure of your company” which is more what we’re hoping for anyway.  We’d rather enjoy the pleasure than the hono[u]r, in the end.

And finally, the part that took the longest to decide: what to call the thing.  Should we call it a wedding? A commitment ceremony?  A ‘celebration of our love’?  Our ‘special day’?  I was worried that some of our relatives might be offended by us calling it a wedding, but then I realized that I would be more offended by anyone having that reaction.  Since it is a wedding, that’s what we’re going to call it.  Anyone who has an issue with that fact can choose not to come, but I don’t want to make things more palatable for any closeted bigots in the family—especially at our expense (both literally and emotionally).  Honestly, this is one of those things that I think we worry about a lot but that in the end probably isn’t a big deal at all.  Straight people ask people to “celebrate their union”, watch them “get hitched”, and all sorts of weird permutations and no one wonders whether they’re having a wedding or not.  I need to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt and try to assume that they’ll have no trouble understanding our invitations, either.

After that, the rest was pretty straightforward: date, time, and location.  So, putting it all together we got:

Together with their parents

Emily Kate and Lynn

request the pleasure of your company

at their wedding

on Saturday, the twenty-seventh of February

two thousand and ten

at four-thirty in the afternoon

(address)

Throughout the wedding planning process I’ve gotten tons of support from my family and friends.  Almost everyone I tell about the wedding is excited for me, and excited in exactly the same way as they would be if I were marrying a man—they ask about colors, flowers, location.  They want to know what my dress looks like and if I need help decorating for the reception.  All of this is very reassuring to me.  Even the friends who are very religious or live in conservative parts of the country respond this way, and it reminds me to give people a chance and not to judge them (after all, who is the judgmental one if I’m prefacing their introduction by saying they’re religious?).

One exception to this has been my grandparents.  (more…)

I’ve been thinking lately about names.  At least part of this started with that terrifying story of the woman who was hospitalized in south Florida while getting onto a cruise and whose partner and children were denied access to her bedside by the hospital staff.  I want to know the best way to deal with a situation like that in case, god forbid, it ever happens to us.  Would having the same name be some sort of get-in-free card smoothing confused staff members into believing that we really are related before they get a chance to discriminate?  What if it was a child who was in the hospital—would the same name (and both names on the birth certificate) make some small but crucial difference?

But part of this is being inspired by other (less scary) things.  The least of these was in choosing a return-address stamp and being annoyed that there is no way to get a monogram with more than one last initial.  Then there’s the house I walk by on my way to work with a sign saying “The Nelson’s” which I note every time for both its incorrect punctuation and the sort of cozy implications of family that come from having a shared name.  And I think about our imaginary future children and wonder if I’ll be sad that we don’t all have the same name—and the immediate recognition from strangers that we are family.  I realize that people will know that we’re a family anyway and that my kids will be my kids whether we’re called the same thing or not (my two stepsiblings each have different last names, and both are different from their mother’s, and they are obviously related to one another), but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

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The only wedding dress shopping experience I had was an awful trip I took with one of my friends when she got married a few years ago.  We innocently walked into a big box wedding dress retailer without an appointment and were so thoroughly yelled at that we both swore we would never go back.

So when Lynn and I got engaged, I was nervous about where we would get the dresses.  Luckily my sister and bridesperson of honor is a fashion designer.  She even did some school projects about lesbian wedding dresses (our mom married her fabulous wife in 2002, during Caroline’s sophomore year of college).  When I told her about the engagement she offered to design and make our dresses for us as long as we bought the materials.  Which is amazing but also a total leap of faith in some ways, since we probably won’t even see the dresses until the day before the wedding—only versions made in cheaper fabric to get the fit right.

My sister at the cutting counter

I knew what I wanted for mine—sort of a 1950s off the shoulder dress, with a detachable underskirt that can be taken off for the reception so it doesn’t spend all night getting stepped on.   I found a picture of a dress I loved (which I can’t find now, unfortunately) that had lots of different layers, so that was Caroline’s starting point for my design.  Lynn didn’t really have any firm opinions on hers, as long is it was floor length and comfortable for dancing, although she did mention liking Victorian dresses.

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While I was working on the ceremony, I was trying to find a way to honor our parents.  We’re so lucky that all seven of our parents and step-parents are supportive of us and our marriage, and I wanted to express publicly how much that means to us.  Since I’m not into rose ceremonies or unity candles, I thought that reworking the Jewish tradition of reading seven blessings would be perfect.  We aren’t comfortable with the original text, so when I found this beautiful reinterpretation written by Rabbi Allen Secher I knew right away that we should ask each parent to read one.  After some light tweaking, we ended up with these:

Officiant: As our children find partners and build their lives as adults together, each family is enriched and enlarged. Would the parents and step-parents of Emily Kate and Lynn please stand. This occasion is a special celebration for you who brought these children into the world, and who have nurtured them into adulthood. Today you are witnessing another stage in the lives of your daughters.  Emily Kate and Lynn count themselves as truly fortunate to have you all standing beside them today, and have asked that you be the first to bless their union.

Lynn’s mom: We wish for you the special joy of being a couple, making decisions together,  sharing ideas, hopes, and dreams, celebrating life’s joys and confronting life’s  difficulties hand in hand. (more…)