Last weekend we found out that the date we’d put on hold at our venue doesn’t work for Collin’s brother and sister-in-law (they are both in their residencies and need more notice to secure time off). We need to get married no earlier than July 1, 2011. This made me cry like a kid whose ice cream scoop just fell on the dirt, mainly because I kept thinking, “I thought I was going to be married in a year, and I’m not.”
And I worried about my elderly and sick relatives dying in the interim, because I worry more than is healthy about that sort of thing. Then I realized that even if we got married next weekend I couldn’t control for that, which made me cry more, but still helped me move on.
And I worried that our venue wouldn’t have any availability in July, but right now every Saturday is open. Which is a huge relief and I think has closed the book on me mourning a May wedding.
Now I have to think about the bright side of being married in July. Which includes thinking about the bad things about our old date that now are irrelevant.
- I don’t have to worry about “rueing the day.” Although I just looked it up and the same poem implies marrying in July will make us poor. Stupid poem!
- The day after our old date was Mother’s Day, so we won’t inconvenience people who want to spend that weekend with their moms.
- The weather really sucked this last May. July is sunnier, right? [If you are a meteorologist and want to tell me I am wrong, thank you, but I’d rather stay ignorant about this for now.] And there’s also the fact that it is pretty uniformly hot in July, and my friends, while I love them very much, are a bunch of whiners when it comes to heat. Maybe weather isn’t an awesome selling point.
- I don’t have to worry about combination birthday and anniversary gifts from Collin. I never did worry about that, but, well, I need bullets here, people.
- I have more time to plan the wedding and work on converting, which also means I can focus more on the Bar Exam now.
We still have to pick which weekend in July. First, I will learn from my old mistake, and do my due diligence to find out which dates don’t work for all essential parties (except for maybe my sister and brother-in-law, who are running around in Spain… but they are programmers, not doctors, and can probably show up for any weekend I demand).
July 2nd is part of a three-day weekend. Some people think getting married on a holiday weekend is terribly rude because you’re monopolizing your guests’ holiday/imposing greater travel costs, other people think it is awesome because the extra day off adds convenience for your traveling guests. I don’t think I need to worry too much about which side of this debate is correct because July 3rd if one of my best friend’s birthdays, and another best friend throws a huge party every July 4, and I don’t really want to pile my wedding on top of those events.
July 9th has a sort of cute date: 07.09.11. It is two days before another friend’s birthday, but I think that is a little less problematic because she won’t have to worry about being hungover from our open bar on her birthday. The only disadvantage I can think of now is that proximity to the Fourth of July might make guests grumpy about traveling, or make me miss one of my favorite holidays due to a panicked haze of “OMG I’m getting married in six days.”
July 16th is the day after a full moon, which could result in a fantastic photograph. But the wedding is inside so this isn’t that significant.
This is hard. When we were planning a May wedding, we came to the date by process of elimination: avoiding friends’ birthdays and Collin’s parents’ unavailability left me with one date exactly, my birthday, which I thought was awesome. Now I feel like I am making an epic decision with no helpful guidelines.
I’m so glad I won’t have to pick the specific dates my kids are born.
HitchDied 