I haven't been able to sleep very well for the past few days. You ask why? Well, it's all for one reason: Jube is arriving on Saturday! Hooray! We have a long weekend in front of us. Luckily it's my fall break, so I have Monday and Tuesday to do all sorts of fun bureaucratic things with him. We are going to go to the French Embassy in Washington, DC, to publier les bans--publish the banns--on Monday. We want this wedding to be legal in France, too!
Then on Tuesday we'll go to the public registrar in Virginia to get the marriage license. Fortunately (for us) Virginia is one of the most lenient states when it comes to marriage certificates. We don't have to have blood tests or anything, just some IDs.
Afterwards, we'll drive back to Norfolk so Jube can get to know his new home a little better!
So, those are our plans. Now that I'm actually getting married, I've been noticing lots of things about weddings that are really annoying. First of all, how did the wedding get to be the most important chapter in someone's life? I saw a wedding planner on TV advising couples that "the wedding dress should represent about 10% of the wedding budget. So, if you're going to spend $10,000 on your wedding, your dress should be about $1,000." When did people decide to spend $10,000 on their wedding? That's more than I'm paying for my graduate degree!
Once she found out that I'm getting married, one of the girls I work with told me that she has a little wedding scrapbook where she pastes pictures of dresses and flowers and bridesmaids' gowns that she thinks are pretty. Then she qualified her statement: "Not that I'm getting married anytime soon! I'm nowhere near engaged!" And yet, she already has her "wedding colors" picked out...
One of my college roommates would periodically tell me things about her wedding. "I chose the song that I'll dance with my dad." "I think that it would be cool if I could wear red and carry a white rose." Hmm... I don't think she had a boyfriend...
People seem very surprised to find that I'm not very stressed about the wedding--probably because they don't realize that we're only having family at an inn in The Plains, VA (check the sidebar for which one...)
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About Me
- Gem
- This blog is about Gem's life. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Jube. She just started her career. Her blog deals a lot with France and Europe, since that's where she has spent three years of her life. (Written by Jube, her husband.)
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8 comments:
I wasn't stressing about mine... and then I realized I'd not-stressed to the point where we had to delay the wedding! 10,000? I swear I saw a statistic that said the "average" American wedding costs $20,000. That's twice as much as I make in a year! Some people are really screwing the curve up for the rest of us... :P
consume consume consume!
I think the only thing I didn't like about my wedding was that I was 8.5 months pregnant at the time... (My MIL made my dress)
We spent peanuts on it and people are still talking about the good time they had...
I've never had those "fairytale wedding" fantasies that a lot of girls seem to have, either. If you fork over that much money to pay for your wedding, unless you're super-wealthy, your life as a married couple might not get off to the greatest start - the wedding might well have been amazing, but there'll be no money left and the first few months of married life will be spent living off Ramen noodles and repaying debts!
We haven't had our "legal" wedding yet, but there were only four witnesses present at our religious ceremony and we fed them homemade lemon squares and chocolate chip cookies. So I agree with you, the simpler, the better.
I hope you both have a wonderful weekend!
I'm with Jube--consume consume etc...(jesus I'm starting to sound French)
The ideal wedding is one where you're actually married at the end of the ceremony. The rest is fluff. Fluff makes me sneeze.
So very glad the two of you are back together again.
I agree with the others, I've never wanted a fancy wedding either. I'd prefer to just get married on a beach somewhere with family and a few close friends present. The thought of having to stand up in front of a church full of people scares me!
And I thought the average US wedding cost a little under $20,000 as well - I can think of much better things to spend that money on!
PS. I can't believe it's already Saturday, hope you had a safe and uneventful flight Jube!
Very simple.
That's how it was for us too, and if I had to re-do it I would do the same. I think that the most important thing in a wedding is being concious of the vows that one is exchanging with her/his spouse-to-be, not the estetics of the event, or what to feed the guests!
(I'm afraid that if my wedding would have been too much of a circus, I would have been stressed for a thousand things that were not important, i.e: the flowers, the cake etc...)
(and also, I don't understand at all how people can wait year(s) to prepare their wedding, or to join enough money for it, or start their life together with a huge debt because of the stupid party!-- I mean, there are enough other reasons in life where you need to wait for something important to happen i.e: the plane of your lover to land ;) I'm not even talking about debts because of studies...)
I agree! We just got married in May and really kept it to the minimum. Plus with 'international' weddings it is hard, not everyone can be there. We ended up doing one, very small, ceremony at the mairie, and then a party in France, and one in the US.
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