Four days into this engagement, we have already overcome wedding-planning fight number 1: The Venue.

Monday was a blur. I had so many emails and phone calls that I didn’t get anything done at work. I was giddy after all, and how many times do you get to announce to everyone you know that you’ve finally found that elusive and fickle thing called sheer joy? I wrote the day off and decided that the next day, I’d really buckle down.

Tuesday though.

I left the house telling GTB that I had a lunch meeting downtown. He said he was going to be really busy concentrating on work. Good.

Later that afternoon, when I returned from said lunch meeting, there were eight new emails and one concerned voice mail from him. I called him back to see what was up. “Where have you been? You haven’t responded to email.” I said I was at that lunch I’d told him about. “Oh yeah. OK, well read your emails and let me know what you think.”

I opened Yahoo and started the daunting task of sorting through the spreadsheets of venues, the forwarded emails from other soon-to-be-wed friends about caterers, and the links to potential ceremony sites that he’d sent. As I was looking through them, trying to keep my blood pressure at a healthy level, my sister called to ask about the engagement party. We chatted for a minute and when I said I had to get back to work, she said, “Wait, Mom wants to talk to you for a minute.”

Mom got on the phone to tell me about a place she found. She was sending me the link. As she was saying this, my work phone rang. I have caller ID at work, so I could see it was my sister-in-law/wedding coordinator. I hung up with mom and answered with Tracey. In the meantime, I opened an email from GTB that said “Ooooh… Ahhhhhh…..” and included this link.

I wrote back, “No outdoor weddings. Sorry.” And with those four words, I crapped all over his life-long dream of a lovely nuptial al fresca.

We exchanged a few terse emails about how you don’t have an outdoor wedding in Portland in June unles you have an amazing inclement weather contingency plan. He didn’t seem to understand. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t understand. In the meantime, NONE of the work my company pays me to do was getting done.

I finally called him and muttered through gritted teeth, “I thought you were busy at work today.” It got ugly. We hung up without saying goodbye and a bit later, I got email from him saying he was leaving work early. I wrote back to ask if he was OK. He said he was steamed, and that we needed to have a talk about how we were going to get this wedding planned.

By that point, my blood was boiling past the point where I could concentrate on my own work to-do list, so I took off too.

When I got home, we sat on the couch and calmly created a list of venue parameters. “No hotels,” he said. Check. ” I won’t get married in a place that has a stable.” Check. After we had a better sense of each other’s dos and don’ts, we looked through a borrowed copy of the Portland Wedding Resource guide and drew up a list of potential sites that met both sets of criteria.

Phew. Disaster averted.

We also instituted a “no wedding talk at work” rule.

The next day at work, I had to call my boss to talk about something work-related. When she answered, she said, “Oh, I should have called you. I need to say congratulations. Are you giddy and excited?” I am, yes, I explained, but I’m also facing that blessing/curse of being engaged to a man who wants to be involved with the wedding planning.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love that he’s so excited. I WANT him involved. I’m glad that he cares. But it also makes it more difficult because it feels like there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen.” I vented.

She said, “Oh, you need to talk to M! She is going through something similar. Her fiance is so wrapped up in the wedding planning and excited for the big day, which isn’t until March, they got their wedding rings a few days ago and he insists on wearing his. She had to literally pull it off of his hand.”

I laughed until I cried. Thank heavens GTB isn’t like that. He might be overly invested in the food we serve, but at least I know he’d never be THAT silly.

When I told him this story later in the evening, he didn’t think it was as funny as I did. He laughed, of course, but then he said, “Well, ya know, it really isn’t fair. Why do you get to wear an engagement ring and I don’t?”

We then had a brief conversation about how patriarchal it is that I’m marked as “taken” for the next year and he isn’t until we actually get married. “The thing is,” I told him, “I like it that way.”

Which is why we aren’t buying his wedding band until two weeks before the ceremony. Just in case.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 11:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.