Engaged

[morning_person]

Things I have learned since getting engaged:

1. Ari really can pull off a surprise.  He told me an approximate time frame for the proposal (and I was glad he did) and I even picked out the ring, and I was still surprised.

1. Platinum is heavy.

1. Pirke Avot 5:22.

1. Planning Jewish weddings sucks.  At first I thought everyone does the same thing all the time because they were unquirky, uncreative people, but now I realize that Jewish wedding require so many rooms, different food served in too many different places, Kosher catering, and too many people and the only way to plan it is to do the same thing everyone else has been doing for ages, even if it doesn't suit the couple's personalities.

1. Of all the potentially controversial decisions I made about the wedding (e.g. separate dancing, mixed dancing, mixed seating, a short engagement period, informal wedding, cocktail hour food service for the entire reception instead of a sit-down meal) the one that was considered most controversial judging by the reactions I got was the decision not to have bridesmaids (or a wedding party, but bridesmaids was definitely most controversial)

1. In wedding planning, 1 person's experience having or attending a wedding is considered a statistically significant sample size and a legitimate argument. i.e. “So-and-so went to an outdoor wedding in October and remember that snow storm - well it crushed the tent!” is a completely valid argument against doing an outdoor wedding in July.

1. It is possible to get married in the Liberty Science Center and get a Kosher caterer.  Actually, I’m considering it.  The Liberty Science Center is actually not the least suitable venue I’ve looked into.  The problem is that Jewish weddings require too many rooms, making the LSC much too cost-prohibitive, unfortunately.  If only we were having a non-Jewish wedding…

1. Based on the number of people asking me this in the two weeks since my engagement, “my colors” (How are colors “mine”?  Can anyone really own wavelengths?) are a decision on the order of importance of date/venue/time.

1. Ari has much more of an opinion on wedding planning than I’d thought he would have.  On the plus side, his opinions are pretty much the only ones I agree with, so that works out rather well.

1. I’d always thought long engagements were ridiculous.  Who needs a year or plus to plan a single 5 hour party?  I’ve learned now that the advantage of long engagements though is that you can celebrate the fact that you’re engaged without having to go into wedding planning ASAP.

1. The difference between my parents’ generation and my generation:  My parents think a wedding is defined by certain formal elements reflected in the food, décor, dress, etc.  Ari and I think a wedding is defined by two people getting married.

1. The Rebbetzin and the wedding blogger on Glamour.com used the same rationale to defend wedding traditions - in the Rebbetzin’s case, it was the tish and badecken, in Glamour blogger’s case, it was all of the outdated and ridiculous traditions like bouquet and garter toss, father giving bride away, wedding cake, etc.  The rationale was, if you don’t start from any tradition at all [no matter how non-applicable], you have no idea how to make the ceremony meaningful.  I expected the Rebbetzin to tell me something particularly spiritual or halachic about the tish and the badecken.  The fact that she didn’t makes me very nervous.

1. I can wear a size medium nitrile glove over the ring and the glove will not rip, however, the ring makes microbiology lab work more cumbersome.

1. You can dance West Coast Swing to “Wake Me Up Inside” by Evanescence.  Not that I found this to be a convincing argument to put the song on our wedding playlist because I’m not that into the song, but Ari demonstrated that it is actually possible to dance to it.

1. I can take comfort in the fact that if every wedding decision I make turns out to be the wrong one - e.g. we pick the wrong venue, wrong day, wrong caterer, invite the wrong people, wrong band/DJ, wrong photographer, get everyone to hate us - or if there is some other catastrophe - e.g. weather, health crisis, terrorist attack - which ruins the wedding, the one good decision I will have made is picking the right man to marry.