The Great Big Wedding Fall-Out

Ahhhhh, those heady post-engagement days.  Those 48 hours where you are literally floating along in a cloud-like train of phone calls and kisses and much, much, MUCH admiring of new sparkly ring on that finger, and “Congratulations!” and bottles of bubbly, and knowing glances with your husband-to-be and general all-round loveliness.

Oh how I miss those days.

*music comes to an abrupt halt*

Why doesn’t anyone tell you that within weeks of agreeing to love someone forever and ever amen, that the cloud-like train of engaged bliss you were happily chugging along on has spectacularly crashed in to a party of school children. And their grandparents.

Ok, so I may be slightly exaggerating here.  Paul and I haven’t ‘spectacularly’ fallen out.  And neither have any school children nor grandparents been injured in the making of this blog post. But there is dischord.  And there is unrest.  And there is a general feeling that I am talking about the wedding TOO MUCH and he won’t talk about the wedding AT ALL.

Now I need to make it clear that neither of these ‘feelings’ come as much of a surprise. As someone who not only works in the wedding industry but has- I admit- been dreaming about ‘My Future Wedding’ for some time, there was a sense of “ALL SYSTEMS GO!” once we were home from Cambridge.  My knowledge of potential venues in and around Kent was already pretty extensive due to my research for Utterly Wow, but now that I had a wedding to actually plan? Holy Moly, pass me that laptop- I’m not resurfacing for days.

On the other hand, Paul retreated to his ‘safe place’ (on the sofa, book in hand) and resolutely refused to discuss anything, repeating the phrase “it’s 16 months away!” over and over again.  For him, the marriage is where he wants to be; man and wife, wedded bliss, deed done, BOOM. But the wedding day itself? I don’t think it’s unfair of me to say that he’s dreading it. Heart palpitations, sweaty forehead, sick bucket… the works.   (Not only is he a shy boy who hates attention but he has many wedding-related anxieties including divorced parents being together in the same room for the first time in many, many years.)  I invested a lot of time pre-engagement persuading him that ‘when we get engaged’ I would make the process as easy and as enjoyable as possible; that I would keep wedding talk to a minimum, and that if he doesn’t want to, no, of course we don’t have to do a first dance.  I’ve managed to stick by the ‘no first dance’ promise (we’ll do a last dance instead- although he won’t know this until he’s drunk and happy), but I am struggling to keep the wedding talk to a minimum.

The long and short of it is- there is A LOT of talk to be done in these first few weeks.  You have to have those initial discussions of where, when, how, who.  You have to put forward what you want from the day and hope that you both have the same vision. And you have to spend a considerable amount of time on the internet- which, in our case, is the main reason we just keep falling out, 6 weeks after getting engaged.

Things came to a head last Sunday night, when we had what is now referred to as The Great Big Wedding Fall-Out.  We chose to have a ‘heated debate’ just before bed, which is absolutely the best time to have an argument.  Not.  He said that I had become addicted to the laptop/iphone/other internet-related device.  I said that his reluctance to discuss the wedding a) in a positive manner or b) at all had driven me to the laptop/iphone/ other internet-related device.  We both agreed that I needed to internet less and he needed to talk more.  We went to sleep tentatively holding hands and still managed to wake up on Monday morning grumpy as hell.  But that was because it was a Monday 🙂

A week after TGBWFO I’m happy to say that we now have a date (25.05.13) and a venue (a big old dry hire barn in Kent).  We are BOOKED and with 15 months to go I can now take a (temporary) break from the laptop and enjoy being a ‘girlfriend’ again, like I was before I became a ‘fiancée’.

Hmmm. Ironic, much?