Planning Apart

This post is the first in the series by guest writers, people whose wedding experiences and perspectives are different than my own. Read below to hear of my friend Jennifer's story planning her wedding with her groom-to-be was stationed overseas.

I recently returned from my baby brother’s wedding in Berkeley – he and his bride put on a very personal, personable event, and it was a joy to see him marry someone so unflinchingly right for him. He & I have always been close, and I’ve become good friends with his girlfriend – now wife – over the years as well. This was especially the case as we planned our respective weddings, as each of us did so solo while our future spouses were studying or stationed overseas during most of the planning phase. So seeing them bring their plans to fruition has naturally had me thinking again about my own wedding planning experience.

My husband proposed about four weeks before he left for a 5-month overseas rotation, and we got married a month after he returned. Was it easier making all of the decisions and arrangements more or less on my own? Yes. Was it harder? Yes. Did things go more smoothly having a single person as the sole performer of research, tester of cakes, designer of invitations? Yes. Was it also a rockier ride having no back-up? Yes. Did I feel close to him, attuned to the emotional import of the event, something to reflect our love for each other and our values? Yes. Did I feel like I was planning a wedding for one, something that was to meet a certain feel & vision (mine), regardless of its content? Yes. Did I love my role as planner? Yes. Did I resent it monstrously? Oh yes.

Let me explain. Very likely, these are poles that all prospective brides – and who knows, maybe grooms – shift between, one way or another; but the long distance factor certainly exacerbated them for me. Moving through the checklists & timelines focused my attention away from worrying about him, and the fact of the wedding was a very real reward looming at the end of my husband’s deployment. But at times, planning for it was also one more burden to bear while he was away, on top of his away-ness & the drudgeries of day-to-day life (“You mean I have to take out the garbage every week *and* plan this epic event?”). Phone calls were few & far between. Discussing wedding details & decisions was tremendously helpful sometimes, insofar as it turned our attention away from the difficulty of the instant (“This is hard – I miss you – are you safe?”) & toward something positive and light. Yet of course it also felt spectacularly shallow at times (“Riots, violence, whatever – I’m thinking that the flowers should be peachy-orange and soft green, not yellowy-orange”). It was a difficult balance to strike at times – consulting him & keeping him in the loop, yet not overburdening him with minutiae, and knowing when to move ahead even if I hadn’t had his input. (I’m not talking just aesthetic decisions, of course, but also financial questions, and potentially touchy issues of family politics – yow!) More important, and sometimes more difficult, was knowing when to not even touch on the wedding in a phone call or email, and simply ask what I could about his experiences, his concerns, the distressing or uplifting sight he may have seen that day.

Ultimately, I tried to bear in mind that working on our wedding in a reflective, meaningful way – planning the sort of event that we would both relish – was a concrete way of expressing my investment in our relationship at a time when I couldn’t necessarily invest in the usual ways. I’m positive that my husband appreciated it, because he said so often & enthusiastically, and because he loved what came out of that planning. But of course I’d be stretching the truth if I said I had this elevated mindset all of the time. Sometimes it was just fun – that giddy, intoxicating “O my god I just *love* this dress” feeling that is the sole purview of a bride-to-be, and sometimes just a pure and simple, well, pain in the ass.

Back to my brother & sister-in-law. During the course of many a wine-tinged phone call, she shared just these feelings about her own planning process with me (as I had with her). And they too had a lovely, quirky, memorable weekend of it – as do most brides & grooms, or so my experience has been. So being a long-distance bride is yes, a factor in how the wedding comes to fruition, but not so fundamental a one as knowing & loving your partner well, or bearing in mind the joyousness of the occasion.