Tear-Stained Dress
I will not allow my monthly posts to degenerate into wedding updates. But as I continue to wean off social interaction and free up that part of my consciousness, the unholy trinity of marriage-house-kids invades more of the open territory. And there is something about our wedding starting to worry me, besides the egregious mismatch between cost and utility.
My presumed bride instructed me in no uncertain terms to cry upon seeing her in her dress. It kind of takes the sincerity out of the moment when you tell me in advance how I must react. And to be clear, I will most definitely have to fake it (which she says is fine).
Many cold remarks can be attributed to me that would indicate to the outside observer I am incapable of crying. This is false. I choked up very recently watching a commercial for toilet paper, and I have yet to make it through ESPN’s montage of troops coming home without actual tears forming every time.
I’m not going to cry over a dress though. Truthfully, I think all wedding dresses look weird if not downright ugly. They don’t even register in my mind. If you lined up all the brides from the weddings I’ve attended, and I had to match them to their dresses, I would resemble my granduncle playing the memory card game. He has Alzheimer’s. He’s also dead. Imagine the empty stare of a corpse, and that's what you would get from me trying to recall wedding dresses.
Ladies, turn off Bravo for a second and listen. The hotness of a dress simply and directly depends on how much body it reveals and how tightly it hugs the rest. Wedding dresses are at the very bottom of the scale. They even kind of scare me. The lace and frilly, bushy stuff and long trains always make me think of a haunted lover in a horror movie.
You want me to cry when I see it? I’m more likely to stab you in the heart with a stake made of garlic. Freak. It’s legitimately scary. After marriage, if I ever come home and find my wife hanging out in her wedding dress, I will pivot 180 degrees and never look back on my way out.
Wear it once and then bury that thing. One and done. I hope that was a great return on investment for us — a price tag with a comma in it for six hours of being uncomfortable and an easy target for stains at a crowded party.
But no really it’s all great. I am excited. Really. I just don’t understand why I should be crying at my wedding. It’s not a surprise. There is actually quite a bit of planning involved, confirmed by another comma in a check I just wrote to hire somebody to help plan. My gawd, are we a media company? We need to hire a planner?
I sound bitter, but I am excited. I am just much more excited about being married rather than getting married. Engaged couples obsessed with their wedding day should ask themselves the same thing. Keep in mind as many as one in two marriages ends in divorce, depending on the stat keeper. That’s a higher field goal percentage than your beloved Kobe.
Are you more excited for the romance? Or are you ready to grind? Do you like rhetorical questions? Are you ready to fight and hate, and watch your sex life erode while funneling energy toward making that next mortgage payment?
Because romance doesn’t last. Commitment does. Every time. Maybe I won’t be weeping in euphoria on my wedding day, but I also won’t ever give up afterwards. When things get tough, I will be there — and certainly not run off crying about it.