Say Yes to the Dress

I've had this conversation with two people now. So I might as well extend it to the blogosphere. It's about contentment. And settling. And tulle.

There's a recent phenomenon in wedding-gown shopping in which a bride ends up buying multiple dresses. She tries on a beautiful dress, thinks it's the one, and buys it. But then she finds another dress, the one she knows is the one. So then she's stuck trying to sell the first one. She suffers a financial loss, but it's worth it because she gets to walk down the aisle in sartorial perfection.

Some brides buy three or four gowns before the big day. Bridal consultants rejoice.

Such a shopping trend makes me uncomfortable.

Firstly, if you're not sure in the first place, why are you buying? Why are you settling? Why are you spending thousands on one deemed not good enough? Is it the panic that there just might not be anything better out there? Are you purchasing out of fear? Desperation?

Secondly, why are you still looking? If you think you've found the one, made the down payment, started the alteration process, what on earth are you doing trying on other dresses? And does this thought pattern carry over into other areas of your life? Will you keep looking at men after you've committed to the one you think is "the one"? Can you be content with your choice, even though it won't necessarily line up with the picture of magical perfection that floats in your head?

I will not settle. I will choose wisely. And then I will stand by my decision. This applies both to the dress I'll buy one day and to the man waiting for me at the end of the aisle. I'll be picky before I buy, not after.

P.S. I should be a wedding planner. And/or premarital counselor.

With Rings on Her Fingers....

I met three women yesterday. All remarkable and engaging and sweet. We were waiting for our ten little preschool terrors to arrive when conversation shifted to ring fingers. Left hands. Each of them sported an impressive sparkler.

I had nothing to contribute. Nothing. No insightful anecdote, no opinion. I just oohed for a moment and smiled as they talked about diamond settings and proposals. I wasn't bitter, uncomfortable or envious. It's just so outside of my reality that I felt my musings would be coming from a completely unqualified source.

Although I did have the amusing thought that it would have been a great day to decorate my hand with something like this:

Should marriage be in my future, my only ring dream is that Mr. Awesome choose something rather lovely that will make him want to hold my hand for approximately forever. The end.

(I think UP got to me. I'll get over the mush shortly. Promise.)

For Michael and Joanne

In honor of your wedding last weekend. In Vegas. I hope you danced to Tom Jones.

Thanks to you, Michael, I can dance to him anytime I want. And I dance like this:

Nia & I: Darlings of the Danforth

It's Taste of the Danforth weekend. And once again, I'm leaving town. My absence is tradition.

My grandmother's birthday always coincided with the Greektown festivities; even though she's gone, the family's still hanging out. As much as I love baklava dripping off my napkin and down my arm in the hot sun, a barbecue with toddlers I rarely see is something I just can't pass up.

Because I live with the Greeks, it's impossible to walk down the street without seeing signed photographs of Nia Vardalos in the windows of small family-run restaurants. She's the hometown hero. And not only did she make a spectacular splash in Hollywood a few years ago, she did so by embracing her culture rather than melting into a cookie-cutter romantic-comedy sweetheart.

I should probably watch her breakthrough flick again. Firstly, because I'm inspired by Nia the writer. By the fact that she created her own material. She wanted to create and perform, so she wrote a one-woman show. And Tom Hanks (and his lovely wife) happened to love it. Just as I'm sure he'd love this blog.... But I could also justify a viewing as wedding-article research. With my new writing gig, I've embraced a new nuptial radar. It's actually quite fun to think about the weddings of others. Fictional planning has a lot of freedom in it.

Over at MovieZen, I posted about Nia's upcoming project. She's making a comeback, and hopefully not of Connie and Carla proportions. No offense to David Duchovny.

Read it here.

And then eat souvlaki on my behalf.

Underrated Part 2: Jeff Daniels

Last night, I watched The Squid and the Whale. I wasn't planning on staying up late to ponder the tragedy of divorce, but there was a party in the apartment above me that sounded like an '80s aerobic class. I swear Jane Fonda was invited. And so instead of silently fuming over the rhythmic chaos, I banged away at my piano and then watched a movie. I like to think that my evening was more creatively stimulating that the one belonging to my "Dancing on the Ceiling" friends.

Jeff Daniels is underrated. But not in a James Marsden way. He's consistently fascinating, yet he manages to fly just slightly under the popularity radar. Maybe that's better for his career. He's not always lovable, or even likable, but he's authentic. And that's all I really want when I watch a movie. If I sniff out a phony, the entire film's a write-off. Even in Dumb and Dumber, I bought his dumbness. And since I previously gushed about his performance in Terms of Endearment, I won't bother to rehash anything here. Let's just say I'm an admirer of his craft, just slightly late in joining the fan club.

Last night, I wanted to slap him. And Laura Linney. Because divorce maddens me. Because I rarely understand it. Because I long ago decided that I would rather remain single than enter into a marriage that can't stand the test of time. Lonely and single is better than lonely and married. Am I a little naive? Perhaps. But I'm also pretty determined to fight for a forever. And people who give up make me want to throw things. I don't believe in irreconcilable differences. Irreparable brokenness, maybe. But don't tell me that after 20 years you just don't mesh.

But I digress. The movie. Daniels. The most disturbing moment is when he kisses Anna Paquin. She played his daughter in Fly Away Home, so the scene had an unintentional incestuous vibe. Actually, I take that back. I'm pretty sure it was very intentional. Creepsters.

Jesse Eisenberg is also now on my radar as "talent to watch." He was very Robert Sean Leonard (circa Dead Poets Society). But quirkier, nerdier, and in desperate need of psychological help. Maybe he'll be the next Jason Schwartzman, also amazing and underrated. (The film doesn't do much to support the notion that divorce doesn't do major damage to children. The boys in this flick are terrifyingly screwed up.)

It's one of those good films I find difficult to recommend. It's just complicated and messy and broken. And incredibly frustrating and unsatisfying.

Oh, and Laura Linney will get her Oscar one day. You read it here first.

P.S. Jeff's also a musician. Which earns him an extra gold star.

Good Enough For a 6-Year-Old

Today, I indulged in a yogurt-honey-banana concoction that took me back to grade one. The year I learned that a perfect summer's day was 23 degrees Celsius. The year Jim Henson died. The year I starred as Goldilocks in our class play.

My best friend was a boy. We were best friends in kindergarten, boyfriend/girlfriend in the first grade, and husband and wife in our make-believe world. And he lived in a church.

You would think that the pastor's kid wouldn't be impressed by church architecture, but his converted home (the master suite was the balcony) was the coolest building I had ever been in. And the kitchen was elevated, where the platform once was. Instead of preaching, there was cooking. "Give us this day our daily bread" indeed.

I loved his mom. She was a gentle, soft-spoken woman with curly hair. I've always wanted curls. And one day, she sliced bananas into our yogurt, drizzled honey over it, and served me the greatest snack I'd ever had. A treat I still crave 20 years later.

(His father was another story. The kind of story that deserves its own blog entry. Or novel.)

I haven't seen my church-dwelling friend since the fifth grade. But he'll always be my first husband, albeit a pretend one.

And as the most awkward segue ever, I read about the origins of the honeymoon today (I was talking about fake husbands and honey, so this is almost related). Abduction and mead. Very romantic. I need to get myself a Viking.

The honeymoon
The more I research the origin of the honeymoon, the more I wish I was a Viking. (To be fair, everything makes me wish I was a Viking.) Legend has it that Northern European men in the mood to marry used to abduct their wives from neighboring villages and take them into hiding while the bride's father and brothers hunted them down. This hiding period came to be known as the honeymoon. How romantic.

The name itself came from a drink the bride and groom would share — mead — that was made from honey. Couples would drink a cup of mead per day during the first 30 days of marriage, presumably to take the edge off the wife's recent kidnapping. (Admit it. There's a part of you that longs to be kidnapped by a take-no-prisoners Norseman who never wears shirts. I know how you women think.)

In a twist of fate that surely has generations of Viking fathers rolling over in their fiery ship graves, many parents now pay for their daughter's honeymoon. (To keep up with modern times, perhaps we should rename the whole tradition boxedwinemoon. I'm just throwing that out there.)

source

Side note: Apparently you can write like a blogger on MSNBC.com. What could have been an informative little piece of journalism reads as pretty on her toes-ish, don'tcha think? I need to line up a writing gig like that. Side comments about Vikings and renaming the honeymoon as "boxedewinemoon"? I could do that. While eating bananas and honey.


image source

The Cost of Marriage: Subway Edition

I overheard a fascinating conversation on the subway today. I wish I was wearing a wire. Because now I only recall fuzzy little fragments of what could have been a really fascinating look into the lives of strangers.

Two women, one a married Christian, the other a single Muslim, were riding the TTC together. The single girl, probably barely 20, rambled on immaturely about her impending marriage. A marriage that sounded more real than wishful thinking but less real than one an engaged woman anticipates. Perhaps she was seeking an arranged marriage. Or she was just jumping way ahead of herself. I have no way of knowing.

I'm the single girl who probably has little grounds for handing out marital advice, but I'm pretty sure that even the most knowledgeable of counselors would be waving every red flag she could scrounge up. Don't get married, child. You. Are. Not. Ready.

Her thoughts on marriage:

• I just want someone who's nice. And not controlling.
• I don't want to have to do anything.
• I want him to have the money. I want him to have the good job and to pay for everything. In my religion, my money is my own. I don't have to give it to him. I want to keep all my own money. For me.
• I don't mean that he has to do everything, I just want him to think that he has to.
• If I don't get married, I'm going to have to move to Calgary with my parents.
  

To her friend:

• [RE: finances, household responsibility, children] You talked about that stuff before you got married?
• How did you bring that up? Isn't it weird to talk about that stuff?

And her friend gently told her about premarital counseling at her church. She told her how easy it was to talk about the important things. Because you have to talk about them. And you actually want to talk about them when you're with the person you're planning a future with.

And the little girl looked baffled. Like someone who was looking at snow for the first time. Here was a woman who shares her money with her husband.


Dear future husband, you can have my heart AND my cash.


And yes, I realize that I called the same person a woman, a girl, and a child. Because she was all three. And should probably move to Calgary with her parents.

Love Lessons: Part 1

One of the disadvantages to being a grandchild is that you never see your grandparents as anything but. By the time I entered the world, they were, in my eyes, old and platonic roommates. I didn't think romance and dancing, quiet moments and stolen kisses. I saw hard workers, not lovers. Occasionally, I'd hear of them going off to dances, but I couldn't really wrap my head around this. Wasn't my grandfather the man who came in from the barn only to fall asleep at the table after a steak-and-potatoes meal prepared by my tired grandmother? Where does a night on the town fit in? Euchre, maybe. But sweeping her off her feet?

On their 40th anniversary, my grandmother put on her wedding dress (Yes, it still fit. How intimidating a feat) and danced with her husband. It's one of the few vivid memories I have of him. He died before their 45th.

When I cried at his funeral, I cried for my grandmother. Sure, I was sad that he was gone. And I was sad that my mom lost her dad. But I was mostly devastated for the wife he left behind. For the next 15 years, I found saying goodbye to my grandmother difficult, as I didn't want to leave her alone in the house they built together. Not once (except in jest) was there a hint of another love in her life. He was it.

This week, the day after her funeral, my cousin stumbled upon treasure. In the bottom of my grandma's closet was a paper bag from Eaton's. Inside were neatly stacked letters. All handwritten. All from my grandfather. All carefully folded and tucked back into their original envelopes.

My grandfather, William, only had an eighth grade education. This didn't stop him from writing her letter after letter, sometimes multiple times a week, while he pursued her. I remember him as a man of few words, so to look at endless pages of written affection is so overwhelmingly beautiful to me. And as the letters approached 1949, he started adding X X X X X to his sign-off. Underlined and all.

I've found it difficult to be distraught over the death of my lovely grandmother. She's dancing with her love on the streets of gold. And no one was left behind this time.

Just Call Me Bridget

I wrote this a week ago. But forgot to post it. And as a disclaimer (because I like disclaimers), I'm not even slightly burdened by this anymore. It was just a moment. That is all. I wish him well.


He's getting married. And there are whispers of envy, confusion, sadness and self-pity echoing in my head. Questions I don't usually spend much time with start looping over and over: What's wrong with me? How is this possible? Why do I care so much? Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. (Okay, so I don't usually call myself Margaret....) Cue the whining.

I'm shocked by my own reaction. And uncomfortable. And embarrassed. (Although not embarrassed enough to not blog about it.)

No, I don't want to marry him. At all. Never have. I can't recall a single moment of crushing, pining or even curiosity toward said fellow. Quite the opposite. In fact, I would have assumed that my chances of getting married were far greater than his. Isn't that horrible? To be so sure that you're a greater catch than someone else? To mercilessly judge others and condemn them to singleness because you would never date them? So now I feel like crap on two very different levels.

He headed out on some great adventure and found his beautiful match. I stayed home and found a rotting grape under my fridge. (That's not a metaphor. There was an actual grape under my actual fridge.)

So while he's picking confetti out of his hair this weekend, I'll be blogging about nothing much and wondering why one geek gets a wedding while another gets a bowl of macaroons and a slow Internet connection.

At least lip-syncing, like time, heals all wounds. I'm only partially joking.

Marriage-Minded

I didn't propose to anyone on February 29th. In fact, that day was one strange combination of nothingness and stressfulness. It was quite understandable why we typically skip that day. I did very little at work (bordering on nothing, that's how little) and then spent four hours on a bus in a snowstorm. Words like "bah" and "meh" started creeping into my vocabulary. Words that aren't even words. Bah.

And since no handsome stranger sat beside me, there was no proposing. But there's always 2012.

I was heading to Waterloo to go to a wedding. It was a rather lovely simple affair in which the bride and groom were totally themselves. Which, I think, is the trick. Who wants to see plastic people going through the motions? It was our first "house" wedding, meaning the groom came from upstairs. (He had been boarding with my parents for the past two years.) Oddly enough, for all my girlie romantic notions, I don't get jealous or wistful or weepy (unless it's a happy weepy) at weddings. I really do enjoy myself. Perhaps its because I like free food. And because I'm not quite spinsterish. Yet. The only painful moment was a rather dramatic cardigan-selecting affair the night before. I think I need to design clothes, as I don't like any that actually exist on the market. (And no, I didn't wear a cardigan after all). Shoot. Cardigan talk ups the spinster factor. I shall stop now.

My dad sent me this story last week (as a follow-up to my last post). My brother Joel frequently says, "I dare you $5." And then I argue that you can't dare money. It's an ongoing conflict that will never be resolved. But the following bet is also a dare, so I suppose that it is possible in certain circumstances. But not when Joel does it. Because brothers can't be right after I've already decided they're wrong.

An excerpt:

CALGARY - For Amanda Hodson, taking a friend's $40 bet that she couldn't kiss the next stranger to board their bus home from school was a no-brainer. Taking a husband in the deal was a little more unexpected.

Five years after the bet, Amanda and Brendan Miles - who happened to be that next guy to climb aboard the Calgary Transit bus - got married Saturday.

"I walked on the bus, she walked up to me and all of a sudden she was kissing me," Brendan said Saturday after the ceremony. "And I just said, 'this is great!', and so I kissed her back."

Right after snatching the $40 from her friend, Amanda offered to spend some of her winnings by taking Brendan for a coffee. The two found out they had more in common than a surprise smooch.

Love the story. Especially because it wasn't me kissing the stranger. It's almost chick-flick worthy, barely relatable (yet somewhat aspirational) to everyday transit folk who only dream of sitting next to THE ONE as they stare at the floor on their way to work. It wouldn't work if the guy was the kisser. He would be smacked, then sued. The city has made me a cynic.

And on that note, a painfully unromantic marriage proposal from the even-more painful autobiography How to Lose Friends & Alienate People:

"So why d'you want to marry me?"
"For proper, non-cynical reasons."
She stared at me incredulously.
"Thats the most romantic thing I've ever heard," she said.

By the way, he doesn't exactly get a "yes" right away with that one. Actually, he eventually gets an "okay." Which, to him, is the most romantic thing he's ever heard.

"It's either marriage or new gloves. You choose."

You learn something new every day. Apparently. This is what I learned yesterday:

“Then, in 1228, a law was passed in Scotland, giving women the legal right to propose to an unmarried man (on a leap day). Should he refuse, legally, she could claim a new gown or a pair of gloves in addition to a cash payment of one pound — and one pound in those days was a lot of money.”
source

I had no idea that this Friday I have a free pass to propose to someone. An unmarried someone (which means I have to eliminate married men from my list of possibilities). Typically, I wouldn't consider it (I'm from the John Eldridge school of dangerous men rescuing princesses), but since a rejection would equal fashion AND money, it might be worth the awkwardness. Of course, for those who've never gone shopping with me, I will warn you: finding a gown that rocks my world will be tricky. You may decide to marry me after all. Which would make it win-win. I win (I'm not rejected) and you win (you don't have to dress shop).

Hmm. Who to choose?