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Busy, busy, busy. While you wouldn’t know it by just reading my blog, back around March 10 I proposed to Lindsay and she said, “Yes.” (Sucker! Ha ha!) A significant portion of each day now goes towards wedding planning.

Generally, this is a pretty fun process. Event planning is certainly something that I’m familiar with, and in most regards a wedding is “just another” event. The interesting thing about wedding planning is the constant battle with cognitive dissonance. It seems that, in general, women have been planning their wedding since they were just barely old enough to understand Disney princesses. As such, an enormous number of the decisions made during the wedding planning process are elevated from “easy” or even “trivial” to “emotionally charged”.

It makes the process so much harder than it should be. Balancing the expectations of a wedding from all the parties involved with the reality of a large and expensive event is surprisingly challenging. Sometimes a great idea is immediately shot down because of the cognitive dissonance it creates with the perception of how that aspect of the event should go, only to grow to desirability after enough time has passed for the great idea to gain familiarity and the preconception is rationalized away to remove it’s influence. It’s a process I can understand, but it’s taxing! Lindsay and I have fought more about this stuff that we have about anything else in our almost 3 year relationship so far.

Perhaps I’ll use that as my excuse for why I haven’t been blogging. Anyway, most of the hurdles have been jumped by now. The event is 80% planned, and I’m pretty proud of the outcome. Lindsay decided early on (after pondering the conclusion to one of our large disagreements) that she didn’t want to just stick with her preconceived wedding and wanted an event that reflected us both, as a couple. It was a remarkable and rather noble decision, I think. Apparently, even the very idea of a groom expressing opinion on a wedding is considered with a chuckle in most circles. In contrast, my bride has decided that our wedding will be a partnership from start to finish, a decision I’m proud of.

It provides a significant amount of my motivation to provide event planning services. I can’t imagine getting married and just being another attendee. I wonder how other grooms-to-be managed to be so apathetic?