Wedding Manifesto v1.2

Wedding Manifesto

As we planned our wedding we came under pressure to spend obscene amounts of money on a variety of silly things--I suspect this is the American way. The pressure was real, came from many places, and thankfully was almost entirely resisted. If it can happen to us--it can happen to you! I’ll outline some of the things we did and why, including resources. My approach to weddings is that it’s critical to save your budget for things that will make your wedding match your goals. Since the budget is limited, spending on things you care about will necessitate ruthlessly cutting things you don’t. I’ll talk more about this throughout. My experience with wedding is a bit limited (though I’ve been to 30 or so I’ve only planned one).


What’s the Point?

When you organize a political event, start a new project, or decide how to manage an initiative, you probably start by thinking about what you want to accomplish. What are your goals? A wedding, for all its differences is still an event and you should start by clarifying your goals. Would you like friends from different parts of your lives to get to know each-other? Your families to acquaint? The friends and family assembled to understand more the nature of your commitment to each other? Give people a sense of how your life works?

What do you view as important? Classiness? Environmental simplicity? Your ethnic heritage? Labor rights? Silliness? Fashion?

Think about your goals before you think about the details. Most do it the other way around and that often leads to spending lots of money on things that don’t meet your goals. If you have it in your budget, spend lavishly on things which facilitate your goals and be relentlessly thrifty on things which don’t. At the end of the day you will be married. You need to figure out what else you want to happen.


The Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC)

There is an entire industry devoted to profiting from your joy. Profiting from your joy isn’t necessarily bad--you are joyful and businesses exist to profit so sometimes it can work out. The big problem occurs when they manipulate you to increase their profits. The easiest way to avoid such manipulation is to avoid conventional wedding professionals. Some are terrific but many aren’t. Typically they have spent years learning their trade and are better at getting you to spend a lot than you are at resisting their charms. They have a lot more practice (several hundred weddings) than you do (this is probably your first, possibly second, certainly not 253rd).

From the photographer who wants you to spend an extra $1000 for some fancy doodad that will “help you remember this day forever” to the wedding dress boutique salesperson who is paid on commission and says “don’t you think you look a bit sexier in the other dress” rather than “is the other dress really worth $2000 more, they are quite similar”, you should know that they are very clever and have had lots of practice. The WIC uses gender assumptions against you, they use self-consciousness to profit, and build up expectations to unreasonable levels. Don’t do business with people who make you nervous, seem manipulative (even if it’s just a bit), or are not on board with your ideas.


Books

As my partner says:

“Don't read too many wedding books or websites. they're bad for your health, seriously, they warp your wedding planning from being about what you and your partner want to being about what they want you to want. It's a mess.”

Most wedding books are part of the broader wedding industrial complex. Books which build up the idea that you are trying to achieve your perfect day should be discarded. Books that make your feel stressed or inadequate are bad for the soul. Books that don’t focus on how your wedding can reflect who you can slowly move you towards someone else’s vision.

Two books we liked (I'd like to add some non-Jewishly-specific books, please recommend):

The New Jewish Wedding
The Creative Jewish Wedding Book: A Hands-on Guide to New & Old Traditions, Ceremonies & Celebrations

Our friend WB writes:

The best non-Jewish wedding book I know is Miss Manners On Weddings. Despite what some people might assume about Miss Manners, the book is subversively anti-WIC, It's very good about discouraging versions of the "everybody tells us our wedding has to have outrageously-expensive thing XX" line of thinking.

Invitations

If you are snail mail oriented you might send out save-the-date cards and invitations. To us, that seemed a little bit silly since most people in our generation do better with e-mail. Turns out doing it with PaperlessPost costs about $0.05 per invitation. Much cheaper than the $0.44 stamp and the printing/envelope that can be a couple bucks. Send out 150, do both save-the-dates and invitations and you can be looking at about $500. For us it wasn’t worth it.

Paperless Post

WB again:

We used paper for two main reasons. 1, we really enjoy stationery and paper goods, so our invitations were a chance for us to share our love of paper goods with our guests. 2, we had a number of guests from a significantly older generation, and we worried that they would find paperless invitations and save the dates confusing, disorienting, and alienating; in order to make them feel more welcome, we used traditional paper for everybody.

It sound as though they really enjoyed the aesthetics of the invitation. Given the amount of enjoyment they got from this, it sounds like they made a great decision. We sent paper invitations to older folks who we thought wouldn't understand our normal approach. In our case, that ended up being about a dozen people.

Registries

For us, it was hard to balance focusing on getting married with a lot of people being excited to note the occasion with gifts. On the one hand, it seemed like it’d be cool if everyone just gave to a charity and came to celebrate but on the other hand it was great to get lots of stuff that makes it easier to cook, serve, and host, since those are all things we like to do. Lastly, it was hard to balance being happy to receive things which will enrich our life with not wanting to be nor appear to be materialistic. Lastly, we have heard a lot of feedback that we should have a wedding registry. One guest said, “look I am getting you a present, you can either tell me what you want/what kind of thing you want, or I can decide. Put up a registry since I am going through a crystal vase phase.”

Typically people go to one or more retail establishments and go around with a scan gun, laser-beeping things on to their registry. For their part, the stores usually encourage people to register for many presents than guests. This has the effect of people sometimes feeling sad when they didn’t receive something that a few weeks earlier they had never heard of, let alone need. It’s a very good way to get couples to demand more stuff than they intended. It’s so much fun to go around and scan things--a sort of twist on on the 1980s hit supermarket sweep. I think zapping is fun, if you do as well, go to a laser-tag place (do they still have those?).

We initially tried to avoid having a registry all together but after much feedback from family and older friends we built one. Our goals were:

• to be very clear that we don’t expect gifts and that the main thing is that folks should come celebrate with us
• to have items in many price ranges
• to avoid an array of choices which would overwhelm folks (see Schwartz)
• to help people understand why we were excited about the things on the list
• to help people coordinate so that we wouldn’t get multiple identical gifts

We ended up using alternative gift registry and borrowing artful language from our friends JN and EM. In addition to gifts, we listed some organizations that we would be honored to have folks support with us in mind. On the gifts front, we vaguely prioritized our list and tried to have roughly two items under $50, two between $50 and $100 and two over $100 most of the time. When someone bought something (more specifically, indicated that they would), we deleted that item and added the next one on our list. This was a bit confusing for some guests but was generally well received. AGR gives a place for text where we described a bit about why we put an item on the list. If we had something specific in mind we posted a link (victorinox makes reasonably priced chef’s knives that outperform ones 4 times the price). When we didn’t know much about the subject we said so: “Composter--We’d like one that turns food scraps into dirt.” For the most part this system worked for us.

Alternative Gift Registry
Our text (thanks JN/EM!)


Families

If they are helping you fund the wedding, it is important to have a sense from your parents about how they think the money will work. Some of my friends have split it evenly 3 ways (couple, one side’s parents, the other side’s), others have picked it up entirely themselves. In some cases the bride’s parents have picked the whole thing up (traditional American approach), and in some cases the parent’s split it down the middle. It’s helpful to have a clear idea from the outset so you can start to have a vague idea of the budget. They can pay for things directly or fund an account that you write checks from (the way we did it).

Exercise: Set up a meeting where all parents and partners can be present. Say something roughly like: “we will take two minutes so we can all visualize a specific moment in the wedding that we are excited about. We’ll then go around and share our moment, what it sounds like, looks like and feels like. Remember this is a snapshot not a discussion of broader themes.” In our case, one parent talked about the ceremony, another the band, and a third the food. We had worried that they’d have strongly differing views but actually, this helped us see that they were focused on different pieces and prioritized differently. It was a huge relief.


Getting to Know You/Rehearsal Dinners

It is important to help people get to know you better as individuals and as a couple. Many friends of your parents, family members, etc won't know you as adults nor your partner at all. Part of the task of a wedding experience (especially any pre/post events) is to help people learn about who you guys are. For instance, rather than a rehearsal dinner, we did an open mic where we served dessert, wine and beer while people played music, toasted us, roasted us, and through the process introduced us to the people who didn't know us well from the other side. It was a lot of fun, and fulfilled a goal (help people get to know each other, and us) rather than us trying to fit our goals into the normal way of doing things (an expensive rehearsal dinner).

The Wedding

With regard to the actual wedding itself, we tried to focus on what things would tangibly help people enjoy the experience and build community. Cut flowers are expensive, bad for the environment, and usually are produced under bad labor conditions. Since we don't think they mattered, we just didn't have any (if cut flowers are important to you, cut somewhere else, and go all out on flowers).

Bridesmaids/Groomsmen

We elected not to have them and it turned out well for us. Our friend Will remarked that he and his wife didn’t need any more divisions and public prioritizations among their friends. We primarily thought that causing people to buy dresses they wouldn't want to wear again was silly. Still, it is important to many people to have wedding parties, if you do this, think back to when you have been on the other end, what would have made your experience better? What did you resent?

Who is the Wedding About?

It’s entirely about you and your partner! Nope! Lots of folks will say that the wedding is all about you--normally to sell you something designed to enhance your appearance. Really, the wedding is about your relationship with your partner and your collective relationship with family and friends. If it was all about you, you’d be better off taking the money and going on a very long cruise or something similarly lavish.

This day, is very important for most people at the wedding. Brides and grooms must resist the pressure to focus exclusively on themselves. Weddings can be hard for single friends or coupled friends who aren’t ready to marry. Weddings can be challenging for people whose relationships are not recognized as readily in society, especially if your relationship is. Be aware of how others may be thinking and feeling--it will mean a lot to them, and ultimately to you.


Food

Since most catering isn’t amazing, it seemed silly to spend $100 per person when we could do fine for $20. Our experience is that catered food is rarely delicious for the price. We focused on a cuisine with a tradition of delicious buffet dining and figured that it would be good rather than amazing. Since we didn’t feel strongly that there ought to be meat or fish, we served vegetarian Indian food (and some bland food for those who didn't like Indian). This cost about 1/3 to a 1/6 of what normal catering would have cost--this freed up budget for other things. The vegetarian-ness also made the food lighter which led to more dancing. I suggest you speak with restaurants you like a lot and see if they’d cater and for what price. Not only will it be more delicious and cheaper than most other options, it’ll also give people insight into your life. For some folks, food is the signature piece of the wedding. If this is you, it’s reasonable to spend like it. If it isn’t, you don’t need to break the bank.

Delegating

We had an amazing experience with delegating. Everyone we asked to do anything at our wedding exceeded expectation and did a breathe-taking job. From the Carinne and Seth who who MCed the open mic and organized a band of mostly ex-housemates to Beth who put together a team to make all the desserts to Jon who wrote a 4-part arrangement and trained a group to sing it while we processed to Kavitha who ran point all day--literally everyone nailed it. We considered which skills each of our friends had (cooking, likes to be charming/funny in front of large groups, creating intense emotional space, juggling, singing, connecting people etc) and thought of things to ask of them. This helped our wedding feel like our wedding and our parents/parent’s friends/relatives got to see why we love our friends so much. Highly recommend!


Takeaway

At the end of the day you’ll be married. The rest is just details.

In a future edition:

How do you get reluctant stakeholders (parents) on board with this plan?