Our quest to put the genie back in the bottle continues. We’ve discussed history and the involvement paradox, but as we’ve said before, lack of groom involvement in the wedding plan is a rabbit hole that goes miles deep. If you haven’t read our previous entries in this series already, we highly recommend checking them out on our blogs page. This will make a great deal more sense, we promise. Now as before, we’re going to address core problems to lack of groom involvement in the wedding planning. And to this we ask:
Ok, this joke could be applied to range of subjects, this is especially true for wedding planning. We mentioned before that weddings are marketed from the ground-up to be unappealing to men. Think about the hundreds of blogs and article that have been pitched to your, the magazines and advertisements directed at young brides that you’ve seen over the course of your lifetime. All of this has been trying to sell you something –that much is obvious, but not so blatant is the slow, incremental teaching that all of that media provides.
Chances are, you know:
- A basic ballpark cost for most weddings
- What colors go with what season
- The general order of events, and what’s expected at each one (rehearsal, nuptials, reception, etc.)
- What vendors go into a wedding and where to start your search
We could go on, but we think you get the point. Now imagine all of that incremental data being non-existent. Why? You never paid attention because it wasn’t marketed to you. How many advertisements that are focused on men do you pass on a daily basis? Chances are, you’ve learned to tune them out. Many people have learned to tune ads out. It’s a survival mechanism to separate the signal-to-noise ration that helps us get through modern life.
That’s basically what it’s like for a great deal of men. They’ve learned to tune out a great deal of wedding ads because it isn’t marketed to them, but with that tuning out comes a lack of basic understanding.
We can’t stress this enough generally women spend dozens upon dozens of hours learning all about the minutiae of weddings, and it always seems like there’s something new to learn, doesn’t it? for many men, weddings planning seems like an impenetrable shroud of hidden and arcane knowledge. One might as well ask them to plot an accurate physics course to Mars than to understand all the types of seasonal flowers and what they represent.
So how do we fix this?
Well, finding ways to get him genuinely interested is a start, as we mentioned last week with The Involvement Paradox, but this can be different. In this case, he wants to help, he wants to get involved, but it overwhelmed by the sheer scope of everything. This feeling of being overwhelmed can easily be misunderstood as apathy, as it’s a natural human reaction to “turn-off” interest when something seems too big to even begin to learn. If you’ve ever had any kind of teaching experience, you know exactly what we’re talking about.
To unlock his want to help, you have to become a teacher, and the best teacher neither underestimates their student’s intelligence or makes assumptions of their lack of knowledge. To put it another way, would a good math teacher get exasperated that their student couldn’t automatically grasp fractions when they’re just getting introduced to adding and subtracting?
Show him where he can help, from the most basic level. Not as a taskmaster, but as a guide. Let him know why this is important, that you tow are in this together and mentally take note of all the things you’ve been trained to know, and recognize that he’s likely been trained since birth to ignore them. Undoing that kind of conditioning comes in two steps: recognizing that it occurs and communicating out of that web of thinking.
Getting him involved continues next week.
Matrix meme was made courtesy of http://memegenerator.net/
