Since we started this blog series there’s been one topic we’ve been dancing around, the wedding plan. It’s uncomfortable to write and not pleasant to talk about, and to be entirely honest we’re not sure if we’re fully equipped to even discuss it. But we’d be cheating you if we did this series and not touched on it. So place your fingers on your nostrils and get ready for the big plunge.
Apathy.
Wow. That’s such an ugly word. If there’s any word that weddings should have a restraining order against, it’s this one. There’s a great deal of ritual and fanfare that goes into every kind of wedding, no matter what a person’s religion or background, but at its core a wedding is celebration, and nothing is more antithetical to celebrations than apathy.
But when someone expresses that their partner isn’t involved enough in the wedding planning, this is usually the culprit being pointed to. It’s the most common and also the hardest to fix. But by-in-large, most apathy about wedding planning is an artificial apathy. A socially engineered one.
Remember how we discussed the history of wedding planning, how we all bought into the cultural myth that wedding planning is the duty of the bride, and then touched on how both marketing and socialization kind of leave men in the dust in terms of understanding weddings? Socially engineered apathy is the by-product of those combined forces. Many man (not all) are taught wedding planning simply isn’t their role from a young age and that lesson is reinforced through media countless times during their lives. That’s not letting them off the hook per-say, but understanding goes much further towards changing a person’s mind than condemnation does. Short of tying your partner to a chair and forcing them to discuss the wedding registry or making them read these blogs Clockwork Orange style, we can only change the mind of the person reading this –right here, right now, and we’re saying you need to communicate all these things to your partner. Flat out tell them you have your responsivities and you cannot (and should not) shoulder the burden of all the planning yourself.
The entire series has been preparing your for this. The thing is many men want to help, they truly do. They have no idea where to start. Pardon the presumption, but we’re willing to bet you fell in love with him for good reasons. Being taught from a young age that weddings aren’t his concern certainly doesn’t trump those reasons. You have to become a teacher. Let him know how and why the old model of the bride and her entourage doing all of the wedding planning doesn’t hold up in the 21st century (and how historically it never was true for most people, anyways); let him know that your understand that weddings planning isn’t designed to be appealing to him (because it isn’t, marketers have made damn sure of that), and that you’re ready to be a guide.
Start small, every effective teaching method starts with the core concepts and works itself up from there. Create a to-do list, let him know you’ll be taking care of X and that you need him to cover for Y. Be open to questions. Ask him what he wants to see in a the wedding. NFL-themed (or Star Wars themed) table cloths might seem absurd, but it’s a small price to pay for honest enthusiasm.
Communication is the mortar is which the wall we call relationships is built. Without it, the pieces just slip apart and crumble. Communicate these ideas to him. Men want their partners to be happy. They’ll walk through that door and go through fire and hale, if need be, wedding planning is a door they probably don’t even realize exists. A genuine blind spot from years (and generations) or conditioning. Show them the door, and why they’ve missed it. You now have the tools to understand and express these frustrations. If experience has taught us anything, we think you’ll be pleased with the results.
