Wedding Planning.

Wedding Planning. It's an amazing thing. It's sort of like planning for a bar mitzvah, but for Jews and non-Jews alike, and you're not 13. The basic ideas- such as Stars of David, kippahs, cakes, and family- are pretty much exact parallels across the two different types of parties. I am blessed to be betrothed to a truly incredible planner and organizer, so she's taken the reins in pretty much all things wedding planning. She's by far done the majority of the planning but she runs things by me and I give them a יאָ or קיין. Here's what I've gleaned from two months of conversations about weddings:

• They're not actually at all like bar mitzvahs. This was a surprise to me. At all the bar mitzvahs I've been to there's been some lengthy Yiddish recitations. I guess that doesn't happen at Mormon weddings. When Caity told me that I was like, "וואָס עמעס!"
• Planning a wedding requires a lot of emails and internet searches. I don't know how they did it before the Internet. Maybe people just didn't get married before the Internet? I can't think of a single wedding I ever went to before its inception, and as such I'm forced to conclude that they just didn't happen before the mid 90s. Sure I've seen pictures of weddings in the 80s and earlier, but that's all they are- pictures. I've never seen a wedding invite from the 80s or catering from the 70s- clearly demonstrating the improbability that weddings as party events actually happened previous to the world wide web.
• There are a lot of similarities between the bride's experience and the groom's experience in the planning process. Allow me to shed light on one or two of these:

1. The bride has 3-4 fittings for her dress. The groom has 0-1 fittings for his suit.
2. ...

I guess I can only think of one difference. It must be the exact same experience for bride and groom.
Thus far I've been super impressed with Caity's planning. She's taken total control of the planning, and not in a Bridezilla sort of way. We still have three months before the wedding and we've already done the following:

• Signed a lease on an apartment (true)
• Got her wedding dress and my wedding suit (true)
• Ordered the invitations (true)
• Scheduled a visit with the cater, baker, florist, and interior decorator (true, true, true, false)
• Started retirement funds for our future children (false)

Caity and I have decided to take some less traditional wedding moves as well. I'm planning on taking her last name and she's going to take my last name. We feel that that's an appropriate compromise. That way we'll both be giving a little bit of ourselves to one another. We've also decided that she will get a dog. It will have to go to work with her and she'll have to take it out and entirely take care of it so that I don't even know it exists, but I've agreed to buy its food as part of the sacrifices that must happen with marriages. Yes, we definitely feel prepared for the selflessness of marriage.