Choosing a Theme

Though I've managed thus far to not buy, pick up, open, or even glance at a bridal magazine since getting engaged, I have of course been all over the internet. Pinterest, once a confusing and overwhelming place full of pictures of stuff, suddenly made sense to me as a human being. In my internet investigations, I came across words that leap out repeatedly on blog posts, articles, advice pages, and photo captions. "Vintage". "Romantic". "Glam". "Hollywood". "Beach". "Bohemian". "Retro". "Garden". To name a few.

I know what those words mean, but not what their implications are in the planning of a wedding. In wedding-world, these words aren't just styles or locations; they're themes, meant to unite the various elements of your wedding so that it's all consistent and makes sense. And I guess I found the concept confusing because I was really struggling to nail down a "theme" for our wedding. Many of the decisions made thus far were based on cost/price, with no theme in mind.

It's only recently that I've begun wondering - does the style of my dress match the style of the this and the that that will also be in the wedding?  I'm generally a person who likes things to match, who thinks in themes and patterns; what if the rapid decision-making in the early stages of the wedding planning means that I end up something that looks like an amateurish mess?

The Batgirl-Nightwing themed wedding that was all over social media a while back was, in two words, fucking incredible. The nerd in me was deeply awed by how perfectly everything seemed to fit together (including the couple themselves), and also deeply envious that they had a very clear, shared interest that was big enough to roll into a wedding theme.

I'm not implying that Batgirl-Nightwing were in any way a mono-faceted couple at all. I'm sure they also had myriad interests and they chose this particular interest as a theme because it was what brought them together. That's awesome.

So I've been trying to identify any single, thematic thing that defines our relationship, or that is even a cornerstone of our relationship. Anything important enough to both of us that could be highlighted and on display at the wedding. I'm weirdly proud to say that I came up short.

Blake and I are what you may call Jacks-of-all-trades. We pride ourselves in being impossible to stereotype. Our joint interests are scattered: we are sporty but super geeky. Into boardgames but also into the outdoors. We love Pixar and Die Hard. We also have passions that we don't share but that also make each of us a person the other loves.

The theme of our wedding will basically just be us and shit we like. Our wedding wouldn't be considered "thematically consistent" by any bridal, fashion, or pop culture magazine in the universe, and that's fine. Despite what they may claim otherwise, there is no actual rule around how a wedding MUST or MUST NOT be styled. Sure, I can see how it all might drive our photographer a bit nuts, but everything will be thematically consistent to us, because it all represents the things - and people - we love.

Moons of Honey

For those who've been asking: no, we haven't planned a honeymoon yet.

It's not that we don't want one or don't think it'd be fun to have one, it's more that it's not very high on our list of priorities at the moment. With a shorter engagement it does mean we have to be really clear about what needs to get done soon and what can get done later, and the honeymoon's right near the bottom of the pile.

Part of that might be the overabundance of options. We can go pretty much anywhere if we saved enough money to actually do it, but where do we even begin? Blake and I have varying preferences on what we look for when we travel, but we haven't even touched on it at length. For a time, it looked like we weren't even going to bother with one.

But the advice I've been given by multiple parties is to definitely have some kind of getaway and not to leave it too long after the wedding. The logic is that planning the wedding is stressful and the wedding day itself is intense - everyone is in your face all the time and, apparently, getting a break involves dragging your bridal party into the bathrooms with you so that you can pee without ruining your dress. Oddly specific example aside, it makes sense; decompression is needed. We will also have family and friends flying in from overseas, so we will also want to spend extra time with them before and after the day itself if possible.

For me, I think I will actually miss the stress of planning a wedding. I thrive on projects - the bigger and the more reasons I have for spreadsheeting, the better. In 2011, I and a top-shelf dude by the name of Dave orchestrated a mass gathering of 30 nerds from all over the country (and 1 notable who flew all the way from the US) in Byron Bay. Why? Because we felt like it. In 2012, I engaged in the long and heavily involved process of applying for a visa to stay in Australia. In 2013, we bought a house and renovated it before moving in.

I don't plan to do these projects ahead of time, mind you; they just seem to pop up and I love that they do. And if I find myself lacking one, I inadvertently try to make an existing, smaller project bigger. I reckon that's how I ended up being a half-decent volleyball coach - in 2010, I went whole hog on training plans and getting feedback from players pre-, mid-, and post-season. Using Surveymonkey. And collating the results for my own reference.

I'm a nerd, guys.

It's an understatement to say that my 2014 project turning out to be planning my own wedding. I will genuinely miss it when it's over, but I'm sure I'll find another project before too long.

I think our plan for the honeymoon will be to do a small one closer to home at first - maybe a month out from the wedding just to dodge the busy holiday period. I find the idea of just hanging out with Blake, with no pressure to do or see anything, pretty perfect as far as decompressing after the wedding goes. Then, later on, we can put any money in our Wishing Well towards a much bigger, longer trip.

Parties Involving Bacholerettes and/or Hens

This post might rub a few people the wrong way, but look, this is really just my personal opinion. It's not a commentary on how I think things should or shouldn't be, it's just a write-up on the way I see it. Please don't hate me!

The concept of the bachelorette party (aka the hens do) is a wholly alien one to me. I have been to many and have had heaps of fun, don't get me wrong, and I definitely appreciate being invited and getting the chance to be a part of it! But the fact that they are a thing remains personally befuddling.

Historically, my friendship groups have been predominantly male. That's not to say I didn't have friendships with girls or aren't close to girls, it's just that for the most part, I hung out with way more guys than girls. Generally speaking, in a big group of people, I tended to gravitate towards talking to the guys. This isn't because the girls were bad or mean or anything like that. In fact, if you know me at all, the reason seems obvious: the majority of my interests tend towards those "traditionally" viewed to be held by guys.

More accurately, both my sister and I were raised in an androgynous way. We explored interests because we found them interesting, and we seldom noticed (or cared) what genders explored them alongside us.

The example I love to give is that we had far more Hot Wheels cars than Barbie dolls, and frequently tried to find ways to attach the Hot Wheels cars to our Barbies' feet as roller skates. We loved Lego even before the Paradisa set came out, and we begged and begged for Nerf guns from a young age (we got Super Soakers instead, which I think is my mum's way of making she never had vacuum up the odd Nerf dart). We just didn't see gendered stuff when it came to what we liked. Neither my sister nor I wore or had any interest in makeup until our late 20s; it's not that we thought makeup was bad or that it was too girly for us (and there's nothing wrong with being girly, either!). It's more that we just weren't interested in it; it wasn't on my radar and I'd spend my money on magic tricks and video games rather than foundation or eyeliner!

But as we got older and the gender divide seemed to broaden right around the puberty mark, we did begin to notice that we were making friends far more readily and quickly with boys than with girls.

I don't know if it's my age group or the local culture, but since moving to Perth I've found that you're kind of "expected" to get along better with people your own gender. I find this bizarre and perhaps worthy of its own sort of exploration. I don't have a problem with it necessarily; it's just been far more noticeable in Perth than it ever was in the US or anywhere else I've lived. Whatever the cause, it does mean that the gender split across my friendship groups is a bit more even these days than it ever has been.

As you can predict, the idea of a bachelorette party to celebrate my last days as an unwed woman with an all-girl cast creates a weird cognitive disconnect for me. Like, I get that it's a bit of fun with your mates before you enter married life. On that level it sounds awesome, because it's sort of true that the dynamics in a given group change as people start getting married. But I don't know why it's been defined as an all-girls (or all-guys) thing.

An all-girls hens party would exclude some of my best mates, which gives me the sense that this is one of those wedding things that just isn't for me. It's great and excellent if it's something anyone else wants to do, and I am 100% supportive of those for whom it is important! No complaints. I just won't be having one of them for myself, is all.

That's not to say I'm against a pre-wedding bash at all. As a guest, I do totally get the idea of meeting other people who will be at the wedding before the day itself; that sounds like a cool plan. I reckon a Nerf war or laser gun fight sounds pretty freakin' fun, but I might scrap the idea all together given that we have very little time left in which to plan a bash at all.

Why We're Not Doing a Gift Registry

Ever since we announced our engagement, we have received a barrage of requests for links to a gift registry. All of these came from my side of the equation, where it's pretty much par for the course for extended family and family friends to buy gifts or give money to the couple at the announcement of an engagement. Now that the wedding is approaching ever so steadily, those requests have become something more akin to demands.

These days, it's pretty common to encounter a Wishing Well, which is in essence a pool of money that guests can contribute towards that pays for something significant, such as honeymoons and renovations. This means that rather than use a gift registry, you can just pop some money into the Wishing Well with the expectation that it'll get put towards something the couple wants.

I've become privy to a broad spectrum of opinions on wedding gifts. Some people refuse to give cash because it can feel too impersonal, too much like you're just paying the bride/groom for your dinner, or too tacky. Some people refuse to give gifts because it's not about what you give, it's about how the couple use the gift, and therefore cash is a better and more sensible option. I have lost track of how many times I've heard the discussion around how couples these days have been living together for a period of time prior to getting married, therefore they don't need all the "setting up the new home" items that were more common gifts for couples back in the day. Or how gifts are just this massive storage problem for a period after the wedding. Or how the excitement of opening a wrapped present is such a wonderful feeling. Or the environmentally unfriendly wastage of wrapping paper.

It all makes sense from both sides, it really does. I have no strong opinion on one side or the other; often, it'll come down to how well I know the couple and whether or not they do in fact have a registry. If there is one, I'll buy something off it. If there isn't, we give cash.

Out of respect to our friends and family who had requested one, Blake and I made an attempt to set up an online gift registry. We failed within 10 minutes of starting.

Our problem, we realised, is that we are extremely particular people. When I say I want a vacuum cleaner, for example, I don't just mean "get me anything from this brand". I will research the shit out of it and other brands, look for the most neutral reviews I can find, compare those to old models or other brands, create a shortlist of possibilities, evaluate those based on what I want in a vacuum cleaner, and then source the best price for that model. (For the record, don't get me a vacuum cleaner.)

We have found no (free) online registry that supplied or offered to supply every possible product we wanted at reasonable prices. On top of that, it was impossible for us to know how much was too much or too little to ask. Is it reasonable to ask for a [thing] costing $[number]?

In essence, those 10 minutes consisted of me finding a number of online gift registries, us staring blankly at each other for what we would even add to it in the first place, and then when an idea did eventually come to us, I went off and did my research. By the time I came back with a shortlist for that one item (at about the 10-minute mark), I realised that it just wasn't going to work. There is no registry that I'd found that offers the best model/version of everything, and we're too picky to settle.

I have to reiterate that we wouldn't have even bothered with trying if it weren't for all the requests we were getting, mostly from family friends I've known my whole life. I mean, another reason for us not knowing how to do a gift list was because we didn't really expect gifts!

In the end, it just seemed easier to field individual requests from the more In. Sis. Tent. folks out there and just direct everyone else who'd like to get us something to the Wishing Well. As it is, it's pretty common in Chinese weddings for people to give cash, so if you really want to get us a gift but are feeling a bit iffy about just dropping dollars, you can always just say you're being culturally appropriate!

Invitation Gratification

This post may end up reading like an ad spot for Paperless Post. I promise that it isn't, even though we did decide to use it for our wedding invitations. We'd received invitations via Paperless Post before - first among them from our friend Jess, who used it for her 30th birthday invites early last year. As the name implies, it's an online service that lets you send out all kinds of cards that would normally be popped into the post. Party invitations, thank you cards, birthday cards, and save-the-dates can all be sent with this service, which can be free or cost a bit of money, depending on what you're after.

It struck me as a great idea for our own wedding because, well, Blake and I aren't really sure how much a stamp costs anymore. You send your guests an E-mail containing the picture of an envelope, and when they click on it, your invitation flies out of it and displays on-screen! The designs are very customisable, right down to the stamp you want to put on the envelope (we chose one with a dinosaur on it).

You can choose to use totally free designs (as we did for our Tea Ceremony invites), or spend a bit of money on the flashier ones (as we will for our Wedding Ceremony invites). It will all cost us way less than it would have if we'd decided to print and mail them off instead.

For me, the money-saving aspect is just one small, teeny tiny advantage of doing invitations electronically. The big winner is the instant gratification aspect of it. Not only can I get RSVPs right away, Paperless Post in particular lets you see to whom you've sent the invite, who has opened the invite, who is attending, and who isn't attending! So I get to look at our entire guest list and giggle with overly enthusiastic glee as an invitation goes from being "sending" to "sent" to "opened" to "attending"! And what if I put in a bad E-mail address and it bounces back? No worries - Paperless Post will tell you if it's undeliverable, too!

I can also send RSVP reminders with the click of a button, which I think is awesome, especially after I'd heard some of the RSVP nightmares from coworkers and friends. Evidently there are some people out there (family, mostly) who say things like "of course I'm coming, you already know I am, do I still have to RSVP to the Tea Ceremony?"

HEY. LISTEN. I'M A BRIDESMAID AT A MATE'S WEDDING AND I STILL RSVP'D USING THE RSVP OPTION PROVIDED TO ME. IT'S POLITE, GUYS. A NON-RESPONSE IS NOT A "NO" OR AN "OF COURSE", IT'S A NON-RESPONSE THAT PEOPLE HAVE TO CHASE UP AND THEY HATE DOING THAT.

That's not just me talking. That's every single person I've talked to about their weddings, whether it was online, paper, or something in-between.

I cannot imagine what it must be like for people to mail off a paper invite, wonder if it's arrived yet, wondering if the reply's in the mail, and wondering if you haven't gotten a reply because they didn't receive it or aren't coming or if the reply's still on the way! Not to mention some people on the other side of the world who think that popping it in the mail on the date of the RSVP deadline means that it totally counts as getting it in on time!

I've heard from a few folks who feel that an electronic invitation doesn't replace the personal aspect of a paper one. I kind of get this, but only kind of. To me the sending of a paper invitation is only more personal insofar as there might be some DNA of ours left on the envelope after we'd touched or licked it. That's kind of creepy, guys.

It's not like a lot of thought didn't go into our invitation. We put plenty of effort into creating and customising everything on it; we just skipped a few steps after that! Now I'm not saying that a text-only E-mail is somehow less thoughtful or not an okay option; shoot, I reckon that if you want to send someone a text saying HEY COME TO MAH WEDDIN' <STRING OF EMOJI> then that's fine and dandy!

Now, a very close family friend of ours doesn't "do" the internet. Like, no computer, no smartphone, no E-mail address, nothing. She's made the point that some people might want to keep a copy of the invitation as a memento of the occasion, particularly for those who might not be able to attend themselves. Ah, now there's something that makes sense to me.

Incidentally, a service Paperless Post also provides is that you can order paper versions of most of their online designs. It could be an idea for us to order some of these for our immediate family members, just as something for them to hold onto to mark the occasion until the photos are sent through! Something that's still being considered, largely dependent on how much longer I really want my To-Do List to get!