Dear Wendy

I hope you’ll try to get pregnant in time to announce it at her wedding reception (which you should definitely go to).

Yeah, so if it’s a get-together with “no expectations for gifts,” are you still calling it a shower? The whole point of a shower is to shower gifts on the honoree so it might confuse ppl to say “no gifts.” Or maybe you just want an engagement party? I don’t understand engagement parties like at all (even less than showers) but if you call it an engagement party, that probably reduces the likelihood of getting unwanted gifts.

Fun fact: we rent our backyard to the restaurant next door to us and they throw weddings back there at least every other week. I can sit on my bed, which overlooks the garden, and see and hear everything out the window (without anyone seeing me). I took notes on wedding toasts since I had to give one a few weeks ago at my bff’s wedding, and I love seeing what everyone wears and the different ways different cultures celebrate (last week there was an asian wedding, the week before that a lesbian wedding, and the week before that a Jewish wedding). Some of the weddings are around brunch time, most are late afternoon/early evening. Almost no one gets a chair.

My wedding was at 11 am on a Friday – a major “don’t” in many people’s books, and ten years later, some of our guests still tell us it was one of their favorite weddings. We got married in Central Park, chartered three buses to take guests to a restaurant in midtown for lunch – where the food was actually really good (unlike the food at most catered weddings) and the booze was flowing. the lunch reception wrapped up around maybe 2 or 3, we said good-bye to most family members, our friends got a few hours to change clothes, relax, do whatever, and then we re-convened at our apartment around 8 for a really fun house/ rooftop party.

Oh, and there weren’t chairs at the wedding in the park (except for our parents and a few older relatives). If you’re a longtime reader here, you might remember a former commenter thought that was the absolute height of rudeness. Whatever – it remains one of the best days of my life.

The argument that the only guest who this truly affects is SIL’s (and ver’s fiancé’s) mother is kind of ridiculous. Isn’t that sort of the one person you’d want to MOST try to ingratiate yourself to when you’re marrying her son? And, yeah, I can 99% guarantee that she is not pleased about Ver’s wedding date. Being a mother of the bride is a big deal and can be an especially big deal for some moms – *almost* as much as being a bride. If she falls into that camp, I promise you she’s been venting to the SIL about how stressful it will be to have both her kids now getting married essentially back-to-back. Has it occurred to anyone that maybe *that* is why the SIL is saying she’s suddenly overwhelmed when a few weeks ok she seemed ok?

I mean, I guess I just don’t understand why, if there’s a good chance that you future in-laws are going to be annoyed by you choosing a date so close to an already-scheduled wedding, you would choose this hill to die on. It’s nice you want to honor your grandparents, but there are other ways to do that (wear something of theirs, use something from their wedding in your wedding – we used drew’s parent’s cake-topper, for example- give a special thanks to them in the program). Do they even want you to share their anniversary? Maybe they do, but maybe they don’t? Maybe they like having a day that is special to them? I don’t know.

Again, I don’t think anyone is necessarily being a bridezilla, but I do think it’s a little thoughtless to pick a wedding date so close to your fiancé’s sister’s date knowing that it’s going to add stress for her and your fiancé’s parents in the weeks leading up to her wedding, and I guess I don’t understand what’s so important about the date you’ve chosen to start your married life on that note.

If you don’t want a long engagement and you already feel little resentful that you had to wait six months before even getting “officially engaged” so as not to upstage the SIL and you don’t want a big wedding – just a casual brunch thing – and you can’t afford a honeymoon on top of going to a destination wedding a few weeks later, and you’re 35 and want to get the show on the road and start having babies, why wait until next year (next spring, I think?) to get married? Is getting married on your grandparents’ anniversary *that* big of a deal? Why not get married in, like, late September or October or November of this year, which I’m assuming would be like seven to nine months before your SIL’s wedding, would keep your engagement short (although you’ve been “sort of” engaged for what sounds like several months already?), and would space out the $$ you and others would spend on these occasions. Just an idea. You really don’t need months and months to plan a wedding, especially a casual one with a casual honeymoon. We planned our Manhattan wedding and our two-week European honeymoon in less than five months, and would have done it even quicker except we had to wait for my parents’ to have time off to make the trip from Germany, where they lived at the time.