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  COLLEEN CURRAN

  altared

  Colleen Curran was engaged for three years before she planned her own wedding. Fearful of the process and confused by what it meant to plan a wedding, she wanted to find out how other women view weddings today. Her stories have been published in national publications including Jane and The Dictionary of Failed Relationships. Whores on the Hill, her debut novel, is available from Vintage Books. She finally got married and now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction | Colleen Curran

  taking the vow

  The Child Bride (and Groom) | Julianna Baggott

  The Wedding Vow | Curtis Sittenfeld

  Diana, Martha, and Me | Catherine Ingrassia

  the dress

  One Day | Elizabeth Crane

  The Girl, the Dress, and the Leap | Lara Vapnyar

  Back in Black | Lisa Carver

  plans & preparations

  There Went the Bride | Carina Chocano

  My Bridal Meltdown | Rory Evans

  The Best-Laid Wedding Plans | Jennifer Armstrong

  etiquette & registry

  Manners and the Marrying Girl | Elise Mac Adam

  The Registry Strikes Back | Janelle Brown

  weddings & the single girl

  It All Started with Princess Di | Daisy de Villeneuve

  The Honor of My Presence | Meghan Daum

  family & budget

  Parental Control | Amy Sohn

  My Perfect Wedding | Samina Ali

  Going Bridal | Farah L. Miller

  My Mother's Wedding, Myself | Gina Zucker

  Father of the Bride | Kathleen Hughes

  getting hitched

  First, Reader, I Made Him Up, and Then I

  Married Him | Jacquelyn Mitchard

  The Second Trimester | Ruth Davis Konigsberg

  My So-Called Indie Wedding | Lori Leibovich

  Weddings Aren't Just for Straight People

  Anymore | Anne Carle

  Rubber Chicken | Julie Powell

  To Have or Have Not:

  Sex on the Wedding Night | Jill Eisenstadt

  for better or for worse?

  Survivor Honeymoon | Amanda Eyre Ward

  Weddings for Everyone | Amy Bloom

  Happily Ever After | Dani Shapiro

  Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  colleen curran

  When I started working on this book, I had been engaged for three years with no intention of setting a date, sending out invitations, finding a dress, or any of the other responsibilities that go into planning a wedding. My fiancé and I had been dating for seven years. We bought a house together. We started talking about kids. Once, he described me to friends as his “life partner.” I just looked at him and asked, “Is there something wrong with us?”

  When strangers, coworkers, or family friends noticed my engagement ring, they'd ask, “When's the big day?”

  I'd always smile and say, “Spring.” I said we were getting married in the spring for three years. Spring sounded so far away, so full of promise, so out there over the rainbow where we would live happily ever after together, end without end, amen. The spring was always out there. We could get married any day.

  As many of the contributors in this collection write, I never saw myself as a bride. It was an issue of identity for me. I felt like if I became a fiancée, if I became a bride, I would lose an important part of myself. The part that I'd spent all this time trying to cultivate—the independent me part. The strong, single woman me. I was twenty-eight years old. My life was finally starting to come together. I was just starting to get published. I was finishing my first novel. I had a busy full-time job as an editor. Now I was supposed to drop everything and plan a wedding?

  I loved my fiancé, Francis. Had fallen for him the first time I saw him on my first day of graduate school. He was tall and strong. Funny and smart. He was an English major, for Christ's sake. We could talk about books. We could talk about art. I bought a house with him; obviously, I wasn't afraid of commitment. So what was my problem?

  I wasn't sure, exactly. But I knew it had to do with anything bridal. During those three years, I ventured into a few bridal gown boutiques but always felt so out of place, I'd chicken out, turn tail, and run before I even tried on a dress. At the bookstore, I'd dash by the bridal magazines, scanning the covers—“How to Make Your Perfect Day Perfect!” and “101 Amazing Cakes!”—while holding my breath. A friend passed along her much-loved and dog-eared copy of The Anti-Bride Guide, which I could barely even crack. Even The Anti-Bride Guide was asking questions and demanding answers. What kind of ceremony did I want to have? Where did I want to have it? Barn or backyard? What did I want to wear? Gown or tube top? There were so many choices. And none of the choices felt right.

  The overt message in the bridal industry is that your wedding is the most important day of your life. Over and over again, in the pages of the glossy magazines, in the bridal shops that sell trinkets and monogrammed napkins, the message is: “It doesn't get better than this, ladies!” Hence the time, effort, and sheer truckloads of cash that go into planning a wedding. I struggled with the idea that if I became a bride, it meant I was going to become the kind of woman who obsessed over seating arrangements, hairstyles, dyed shoes, caterers, and floral arrangements. I'd stop being the strong, independent, career-minded woman that I'd always wanted to be. Every time I thought about planning my wedding, I felt like I was crossing a line, moving over into enemy territory, where I would lose my time, my identity, and myself.

  The bridal industry is big business today. There are 2.4 million couples getting married in the United States every year. More than $72 billion is spent in the United States annually on weddings. As contributor Catherine Ingrassia reports in “Diana, Martha, and Me,” the average cost of a wedding in America is roughly $26,800. Most women spend six months to a year planning their wedding, with or without the aid of a wedding planner. I had a hard time making peace with this information. Especially when I felt very strongly that the symbols of the modern white wedding— the white dress, the veil, the father giving away the bride— don't translate to modern life.

  The traditional white wedding isn't going out of style any time soon. And yet there are new traditions, new ceremonies to symbolize the commitment of two people to a life together—from couples getting hitched in a drive-through ceremony to same-sex marriage (which at the time of this writing, is still not legally recognized in most U.S. states, except for Massachusetts). And despite the big numbers spent on weddings, the modern wedding is changing. For example, today, many brides pick and choose which elements of the wedding they want to employ, from foregoing the veil to ditching the retinue of bridesmaids. Others get married by friends ordained over the Internet. And even more couples decide to scrap the tradition of making the bride's parents pay for the wedding and instead decide to foot the bill themselves.

  As I thought more about planning my own wedding, it became clear that the modern wedding, like any ceremony embraced by an ever-changing culture, is shifting, changing to fit the times. The modern wedding is new ground. And I wanted to figure out how to navigate that territory. How to make it work for me. I wanted to know, how do other women deal with it?

  I began contacting other women writers, writers whose work I admire, writers with bright minds and sharp wits, to ask them about their weddings. How did they deal with their weddings? What happened? Did they elope? Did they have big splashy affairs? How did they make their weddings work for them?

  And respond they did.

  I heard from a few writers who got married in their twenties, more who got married in their thirties, and several who got married (for the first or third ti
me) in their fifties and beyond. I heard from brides who got hitched on a shoestring budget to brides who “brought on the pouf and circumstance” (in their own words). And for the first time, I started to hear voices that rang true, that made sense to me, more than anything else I had read in bridal magazines or on TheKnot.com. I heard from women like Elizabeth Crane, who thought that $1,000 was a ridiculous amount to spend on a couture dress that she would wear for approximately eight hours. Instead, she went looking for a homemade dress at a price she could live with. I heard from women like Jacquelyn Mitchard, who writes about what it was like to be widowed, with no expectation of falling in love again, but how she fell head over heels for her sexy, young carpenter and decided to marry again. I heard from writers like Farah L. Miller, who had to deal with divorced parents who refused to get along at her wedding. I heard from single women like Meghan Daum, who writes about what it was like to attend a wedding after yet another painful breakup and Curtis Sittenfeld, who writes about her vow to attend every wedding to which she was invited. I heard from Ruth Davis Konigsberg, who writes about what it was like to be pregnant at her own wedding; while Anne Carle writes about her backyard wedding in “Weddings Aren't Just for Straight People Anymore.” Not all the essays are about living happily ever after, because real life is not a fairy tale. For example, in “The Best-Laid Plans,” Jennifer Armstrong writes that despite her obsessive planning for the big day, she realized that she wasn't ready to get married and called off her wedding. And then I heard from others, like Dani Shapiro who writes in the sharply observed “Happily Ever After” that the wedding is merely one day in a woman's life, that the real celebration is the many days of sharing a life together that come after the wedding.

  Here are essays that explore with candor and wit the importance of the modern wedding, how it is changing today, how these women dealt with those changes and pulled off weddings that worked for them: whether their weddings were traditional, nontraditional, or a combination of both. Here are women telling the truth about what the big day is really like.

  As I worked on this book, I learned that planning your wedding can be fun and exciting (as well as frustrating and crazy-making). I discovered that you can throw a wedding on your own terms. That the wedding isn't about running through a series of motions that don't mean anything to you. I learned that the wedding is meaningful. That it is important—like any ritual or ceremony that we decide to embrace. It just depends on how much meaning you want to give to it.

  This past spring, I finally got married. And for a short time while I was planning the wedding, I did become the kind of woman who spent too much time worrying over the font on invitations and monogrammed matchbook covers. But for once, I was glad to have that time. I had finished my novel; the hours at my job had eased up; there was time. Planning my wedding was a time to focus on something that wasn't just about me and my single girl plans: It was about taking the time to focus on my family, my friends, and most important, it was about my husband and our life together.

  In May, I got married in my side yard, among three rosebushes, flowering day lilies, and blue hydrangeas. We were married by an Episcopalian minister who spit on us a little as he pronounced us man and wife. We were surrounded by friends and family who had driven miles or flown across the country to celebrate with us. I truly felt crushed by love, as Julianna Baggott writes in her essay “The Child Bride (and Groom).” We danced, we drank, we were surrounded by love, a love that keeps going for us.

  I hope this book does the same for you. That it opens the conversation about the state of the modern wedding. That it shows you can throw a wedding on your own terms and not lose your identity. That it explores, as Lara Vapnyar writes in her essay “The Girl, the Dress, and the Leap,” the many exciting, frightening, and thrilling ways that the modern wedding with all its trappings isn't really about finding the perfect wedding dress or getting the perfect font on a monogrammed matchbook cover. It's about being ready to take a leap of faith—being ready to say, “I do.”

  taking the vow

  the child bride (and groom)

  julianna baggott

  THE BEGINNING

  I was only twenty-three years old when I got married. Dave was twenty-six. By today's standards of arrested adult development, regression, and ever-rising life expectancy rates, I was a child, and maybe Dave was, too. In any case, that's what it felt like and, with each anniversary we celebrate, we seem to have been younger and younger way back when we got married.

  I met my husband, Dave, in grad school at the very first party of the year. A month later, we were on a road trip together. We pulled off I-95 to have sex in a Red Roof Inn, midday. This is astonishing only in that we were so damn poor. Sex at a Red Roof Inn was a huge luxury. There, perhaps inspired by the grandeur, lounging under the orange comforter, he told me that he wanted to spill his guts.

  I said, “Okay.”

  He said, “I really like you.”

  Now this didn't strike me as spilled guts. We'd been inseparable since we first met. He'd just taken me to a family reunion and, on the way, he'd met my parents. We'd pretty much covered the liking, even the really liking. I said, “I don't think that constitutes having spilled your guts.”

  “How about this?” He paused and then said, “I'm in love with you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Now this, this was spilled guts. It was completely courageous and elegant—even amid the Red Roof Inn décor with its paintings bolted to the walls. I took it as a proposal. I said, “Yes,” as in I accept, as in Ido. “I love you too.”

  I should stop right here and say that everything from here on out in this essay is foofaraw. This is the essential moment that Dave and I consider to be the start of our mar-riage—not the wedding itself. Embedded in every marriage, there is a true moment when your hearts sign on for good. It doesn't necessarily happen when the guy mows Will you marry me? into your lawn or trains a puppy to bring you a velvet box. It doesn't necessarily happen in the white hoop gown or because some exhausted justice of the peace says so. It usually happens in some quiet moment, one that often goes unregistered. It can happen while you're brushing your teeth together or sitting in a broken-down car in the rain. Some unplanned, unscripted moment.

  But when people ask about your wedding day, they want a grand story. Not something that ends with stealing mini hotel soaps and shampoo bottles from a Red Roof Inn.

  And so we make up another story. We create a grand affair.

  A GENERATIONAL FOOTNOTE

  We announced our engagement two months after the Red Roof Inn affair, and it's surprising now how unsurprised everyone was. It seemed like such a normal thing to do at the time—to fall in love, get engaged in three months, and get married in less than a year—at age twenty-three. And yet now, a decade and a half later, this seems like a terrible idea—a choice that only the destitute would make in a time of crisis.

  But this was all happening right on the cusp of a new generation of women. The generation that had gone before us and tested the you-can-have-it-all notion had come back and written up a sobering memo: Balancing family and work was much harder than they'd thought.

  My friends evidently were digesting the news. They started in on careers first. Their marriages, if they came at all, came late. Many have just gotten married in the last two to three years and now in their late thirties are starting to have their first children.

  All that needs to be said here is this: I missed the memo completely. Was I out drinking? Was I too distracted writing poems on cocktail napkins? Was I already in a Red Roof Inn having sex off I-95? Hard to say.

  THE PREPARATION

  I had no real wedding plans in mind. I'd never dreamed about my wedding day. I knew girls were supposed to. I knew women were likely to have planned it many times over before the day actually arrived. But I hadn't. I was in graduate school. I loved graduate school. I'd still be there if they'd have let me stay on. Dave felt the same way. We were only inte
rested in the ceremony's readings and in writing our vows—we were in graduate school for such things. Basically, we wanted in on the word action, but everything else, well, we didn't much care.

  When people would say, “Your big day is coming up,” I'd cringe. I didn't want to shove myself into the gown and get dolled up. I didn't want to have to accept the heavy weight of marital advice—from the blissful hand graspers to the depressives explaining, through gusty sighs, that marriage constitutes a life sentence of hard labor. I wanted bigger days to look forward to—maybe quieter but bigger in their own ways.

  Our rings are a good example of our lack of interest. My great-grandfather had found a diamond brooch in a lump of tar while cleaning out a ladies' room some decades earlier, and the diamonds had found their way into a number of rings throughout the family. We used some of these from a ring that my grandmother had given me, then got a plain white gold band and a gold ring for Dave, both purchased through the strip-mall chain Van Scoy. The total cost: $239.99.

  My mother was going to make my gown, but in the first store we visited to look for ideas, I found a dress on sale. I said, “Close enough.” It cost $79.99.

  My parents, who have four kids, have a system for weddings. They give each of us a set figure. One: You can elope and take it all in a lump sum. Two: Use all of it and then some of your own to throw a huge bash. Or, three: Our choice, throw a low-budget affair and pocket as much of the leftover as possible.

  As I mentioned above, we were in grad school for poetry and fiction. This was, quite possibly, going to be the largest chunk of change we'd ever see in our entire lives.

  We chose to have the wedding in my childhood church. It is one of the ugliest churches in America. When they do the photography art book of ugly churches, you'll find it right up front on page two—if not the cover.

  It's a squat cinder-block number with a few stained-glass triangles in the concrete facade. The plastic chairs are mis-matched—various shades of green, orange, and yellow. The art in the church was done solely by parishioners. The Stations of the Cross were abstract—black felt spiderlike things on purple felt backgrounds. The Jesus on the Cross was, well, how do I put this? Big-boned? Heavyset? He was fat. His loincloth was skimpy, and, because he was lifted high above us, you felt pervy when you raised your eyes to him—as if you were trying to catch a glimpse up his skirt.