Wedding Planning for Men

Find a woman, get married and live happily ever after...

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Step 6. Planning the Wedding

Without clawing your eyeballs out on the way

You don't count

Let me break it to you guys: when it comes to the wedding, you really don't count. As far as things are concerned you are nothing but a warm body for a tuxedo, and completely replaceable at any time. Ever wonder why the men always dress the same? That way in a pinch one of the groomsmen can stand in for the groom, and nobody will even notice the difference. The general hierarchy is as follows:

1. the bride
2. the bride's mother
3. the bride's sister who's so ugly she'll never get married herself
4. the maid of honor
5. all the bridesmaids
6. the wedding coordinator
7. various other women at the wedding
8. the officiant
9. the photographer
10. the caterer
11. the florist
12. the groom's mother
13. the flower girl
14. the groom

There you have it, #14. Not too bad at all actually, all things considered.

Set a date and make it soon

You don't want to be engaged for very long. You want to be engaged just long enough to plan everything, and not a day longer. Planning a wedding is hell, and you want to get out of that hell and on with the honeymoon as fast as possible. 12 months - bad. 9 months - better. 6 months - better yet.

If you don't care, act like you do

Obviously you don't care about the color of the place settings. You are a man, and men don't have room in their brains for things like that. We have important stuff in there like quotes from Seinfeld and the number of hot dogs we ate at that barbeque when we were 15. But you know what, your fiancee is going to ask you about all sorts of things to do with the wedding, and she is going to expect you to care. Sometimes it's easy (Q: Do I look fat in white? A: No, you look ravishing), but more often she's going to force you to choose between several options. So not only do you have to pretend to care, you have to pay attention to! It's a long road, and the only good news is that it doesn't last forever.

Be as involved as you need to be, not more

Maybe your fiancee has 2 dozen girlfriends living nearby and a meddlesome mother. If that's the case, all you have to do is act interested (see above), and get the hell out of the way. A man has no place in such a group, and you will only slow them down. Then again maybe your fiancee is a friendless orphan, and you're all she's got. You're going to have to take part in food tastings (good), flower selection (hell), color choices (hell), music choices (hell), venue selection (hell), photographer selection (hell) and the list goes on. But you asked her to marry her (you were the one that did the asking, right?), so now you are paying the price. It will be worth it in the end. More likely though your fiancee is somewhere in between, so participate only as much as you absolutely have to. That way when she gets stressed out, your fiancee can come to you for love and to vent her frustrations, rather than seeing you as the cause of all of them.

Pick your battles

It's entirely possible that you will genuinely care about certain aspects of your wedding. That's okay, it happens to the best of us. Naturally, it's in those particular aspects that your fiancee is going to completely disagree with you. So think carefully about what's really important to you, and pick your battles. Remember, you are only #14, so you can't expect to have too much of a say in how things go.

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