Tag Archives: engaged

[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part Two

by Steph | Leave a comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part Two

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine [Read Part One]

…So we had to find other ways to plan our wedding, ways that didn’t require us to designate one partner as the bride and the other as secondary. We had to try to figure out how to play to our individual strengths while supporting each other and checking in with each other. Because we both identify as “brides” and neither of us feels like a “groom”, this might have been easier for us than for some straight couples. I’m not actually sure. Like I said, I’ve never gotten married before.

We’ve been taking on individual tasks where we can, doing a lot together, and trying to be honest about what we are capable of. I’ve heard it said that nothing will test the staying power of your relationship quite like planning a wedding, and that might be true. I’ll be honest – it isn’t all lovey-dovey. We’ve certainly had our share of disagreements. We try to remember that our wedding, like our marriage, isn’t something one person is doing and the other is going along with. It’s something we are doing together. It should reflect that.

That doesn’t mean that we both have to do every single thing. For example, Chelsea gets kind of freaked out by numbers, and I get kind of freaked out by making phone calls. One of our first agreements about the wedding was that she is in charge of calling people, and I’m in charge of drawing up the budget. Sometimes I’m a bit more planning-oriented than she is, which means that often times I’ve been the one bringing ideas to the table, and then we make decisions together. But it’s not exclusively like that, and I don’t make decisions about the wedding without her, or vice versa. I won’t sign up for any site that offers me a “community of other brides” and asks me to list us as “Katherine” first and “and her partner Chelsea” second. It may seem like a little thing, but language matters.

• •

It feels particularly important because we are trying to do this whole getting married thing as ethically as possible. One of our biggest values as a couple is being in an egalitarian partnership, and one of the best things about our particular egalitarian partnership (we’ve both said this, at various points) is that we help to push each other to live according to our values. So when we discussed the possibility of hiring a caterer, we needed to talk to each other about what our ethical requirements would be for that (local business? locally sourced ingredients? plant-based foods? where is it ok to compromise and where is compromise off the table?) and how that would play out before we could look into any specific options. We aren’t either of us perfect, and our wedding won’t be perfect either.

But for it to be the best that it can be, we need to be doing it together.

 • •

Readers: Are you and your fiancé/e splitting up the wedding planning tasks? If so, how?

[engaged in the d] Bride on Bride – Part One

by Steph | 1 Comment

Bride on Bride: Patriarchy, Bride Culture, and Space to Be Queer
Part One

Engaged in the D blog post by Katherine

First, a confession: Sometimes I spend a lot of time on Facebook. It can be both a useful tool for staying connected with people, and a time-suck that drains all of one’s emotional energy and leaves one sort of generically angry and displeased with the world, and yeah, I use it for both. Now that that’s out of the way.

Last year, before I was engaged, nearly all the ads I saw on Facebook were for engagement rings. That’s not particularly surprising, I’m a mid-late twenty-something, and I listed myself as “in a relationship”, I’m sure without knowing anything else about me, that made me part of the prime market for such a thing as far as the algorithms were concerned. It did feel a little eerie, though, to see those ads all the time, while I was nervously ordering Chelsea’s ring and planning the proposal.

And then, I proposed. And then, yeah, we had to change our relationship status on the internet. It was easier than calling every single person we know.

And then, like magic, the ring ads disappeared.

What came next was an awful lot of ads to help us plan our wedding. I’ve never planned a wedding before (first and only time doing this!) and so I found myself wondering which, if any, of these sites that were being advertised would be helpful to me. I even clicked a couple of them.

And then the problem became apparent. Did I say “ads to help us plan our wedding?” because that isn’t actually correct. I meant “ads to help me plan my wedding.” That’s when I discovered what I now refer to as “Bride Culture.”

Bride Culture is the culture of immense pressure put specifically on engaged women. It was that the wedding is mostly about the woman, mostly about the dress. It says that everything has to be perfect, and by perfect, we of course mean perfect according to your 8-year-old self who watched too many princess movies, regardless of whether or not your values and goals have changed since then. Bride Culture assumes that your wedding is the most important day of your life, and that it is planned by the Bride (and maybe her mother) with very limited input from whom she is marrying.

And just in case it isn’t obvious, Bride Culture is definitely part of patriarchy.

• •

Now I don’t have a problem with how anyone else has their relationship, or how anyone else plans their wedding. If you determine that one partner has more interest in or time for planning the event than the other partner, cool, that person should probably plan it! If that person happens to be a lady, that’s cool too. The problem that I have is the cultural assumption that women are the ones planning weddings, and the implication that there are these crowds of disinterested partners (mostly grooms, but I found the same assumptions on plenty of gay wedding sites as well) just waiting in the wings for their blushing brides to finish making all the decisions.

Put quite simply, it just wasn’t us.

• •

Want to learn how Katherine and Chelsea have shifted away from the Bride Culture paradigm in their wedding planning process? Come back to LoveintheD next week to read more!

Engaged in the D – Meet the LoveintheD guest bloggers!

by Steph | 4 Comments

I am excited to announce that LoveintheD has four new guest bloggers! All of them are engaged people planning their weddings in Detroit. Katherine will be one of the guest bloggers, Roland will be another, and Chris and Melissa are planning to write some posts together as a team!

Are you as excited as I am to hear what they have to say about their wedding planning experience? I anticipate that you, the LoveintheD readers, will get to read all about making weddings as close to zero waste as possible, learning how to make a wedding dress, and ways to keep costs down and support local vendors.

Meet the “Engaged in the D” guest bloggers for Loveinthe D.

Katherine and Chelsea engagement pic

Katherine & Chelsea

Wedding date: Friday, September 6, 2013

Katherine tells the engagement story:

It was the end of December, the last full moon of the year. Shortly after Chelsea and I started dating, we started celebrating full moons together as often as possible. In the summer, sometimes we’d pack a picnic. In the colder months, typically we’d take a walk. So, two days after Christmas, I came home from visiting my family in Lansing, and I asked her if she would like to take a walk with me. The sky was perfectly clear. My heart was about to fly out of my chest. She said that sounded nice.

I mulled some wine and we set out. I am not very good at keeping secrets or surprises, especially with people I am close to, because I want to tell them everything. I was so certain I would give my purposes away at any moment, but somehow it didn’t happen. On the walk we talked about past full moons, about how we’ve grown together, about how funny it now seems that we were once shy and nervous around one and other all the time, and about the idea of building a future on this foundation of love and support. I steered us towards one of my favorite pedestrian bridges, so we could look at the moon. Then I took a candle out of my pocket, only to discover that my lighter was broken.

So I had to read my speech by moonlight.

I won’t reproduce it here or anywhere, but it was about how being with her has made me a better person, and I want to keep growing with her. She smiled, just thinking I was being romantic and sweet, until the end. At the end, I offered to spend all of my days with her, and asked for the favor of getting to share hers. I watched her hands creep up over her face. And it was at that romantic moment that I realized, I hadn’t got out the ring yet, and in all of my planning, I’d never decided if I was going to kneel! The ring is beautiful (plug for Emily Wiser, who made the ring and is making my engagement ring, and our wedding bands as well) and also ethical and personal. It’s all recycled gold, and the stone is a small moonstone. One of the old legends about moonstones is that, if you give one to your lover on the full moon, it will strengthen your bond and make your relationship more enduring.

She said yes. We’re getting married on September Sixth, Two Thousand Thirteen.

Chris_Melissa beach

Chris & Melissa

Wedding date: Saturday, July 20, 2013 at the Detroit Yacht Club 

Chris tells the engagement story:

I didn’t propose to Melissa. We arrived at a consensus. Melissa Damaschke, enivronmentalist, feminist, progressive, and protector of the Great Lakes, did not want to be “asked” to be a man’s wife. I knew this and other things from the many discussions we’ve had on the subject for the last six years. However, the term “consensus” was a recent development. Nonetheless, in October 2012, recognizing a marriage would be somewhere in our near future, we fell into a life of Sinful Living with all its temptations: sharing an address, splitting bills, and passive/aggresively leaving dishes in the sink. I don’t make enough money as a piano teacher and part-time art teacher to have surprised her with a really nice diamond ring.   This is acceptable, however, as Melissa didn’t want a diamond given the complicated and violent world of the diamond trade. Infact, lucky me, she’s not really into jewelry.

Saturday morning, November 3rd 2012, Melissa and I were running errands one of which was a stop at SOCCRA (the recycling center in Troy/Royal Oak on Coolidge). After we dumped a few boxes of paper, plastic, and glass we returned to the car. I turned down the volume of the stereo and reached for her hands. I said, “I’d like to put forth a vote on us getting married.” She laughed and said, “Seriously, Holt? You’re doing this here?!” I replied in the affirmative. “Where else does one reach a consensus with Melissa Damaschke?”  She laughed again and said yes. No ring, just a simple question put forth to the vote.  When we got home, I pulled-out a twist tie.  Wrapping it around her finger I said, “This is what you get for marrying a poor musician. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Now, we’re looking forward to our Green Detroit wedding!

matthew and roland

Roland and Matthew

Engagement story coming soon!

Engaged readers: What are the highlights from your wedding planning process thus far?