3.0: The Importance of Her Wedding To A Woman

"OVERLORD"

Eisenhower and the military staff who planned the Normandy Invasion were amateurs compared to Your Beloved, her mother, all the various & sundry sisters, aunts, cousins, girlfriends plus that snooty maitre'd at the Banquet Room, all of whom combine with the megalithic, $40-Billion-dollar-a-Year entity known collectively as "The Wedding Industry".

The planning staff at SHAEF only had to bring the necessary personnel and material together once in a millennium. The Wedding Industry, on the other hand, cranks out hundreds of thousands of these bad boys a month - and that's just in the U.S. alone.  And yes, I agree, we do live in a great country.

Now, let's slightly digress, shall we?

Think back for just a second. Back to a much more innocent time. A time when you were, say, 5 or 6 years old. Young enough to daydream about being center fielder for the Yankees (or maybe a striker for Manchester United) and leaping a tall building in a single bound or perhaps owning your own 2.6 mile particle accelerator in a secret site deep beneath the Nevada desert and still able to believe that it all just might actually happen?

Well guess what, Peter Parker? Your wife wasn't dreaming about unattainable, pie-in-the-sky crap like that. She was thinking about her wedding day.

Believe it or not, while you were scheming about how you could somehow get your hands on Spiderman's web shooters without your dad finding out, she was thinking about walking down the aisle to become the future Mrs. Your-Name-Here in loving, impractical detail.

Instead of scheming for an official "The Duke" NFL football, her daydreams centered on a perfect, pearl-encrusted, silk-and-Spanish-lace Marchesa gown with the completely impractical but-oh-so-romantically beautiful 15 foot long train, right down to the little gold-on-pearl-white, hand-engraved matchbook covers that would trumpet her wedding announcement nestled along side little hand-made nose-gays done in her chosen bridal party colors, both lovingly laid out at every place setting at the country club reception for anyone lucky enough to be invited to your gala affair to take home with them and keep forever and ever.

(Wow, that sure was a long run-on sentence, huh? And no, don't ask me what the hell a nose-gay is, I have no idea.)

Saying that her wedding is important to your fiancee is like saying a hurricane generates a few raindrops. Just as you once would have shrieked your defiance at anyone who dared challenge your dream of crushing a fastball into the cheap seats at Fenway, so your wife is going to be equally protective of her wedding day hopes, dreams and desires. Regardless of how logistically and financially impractical they are.

The fact that she's no longer six years old and is supposed to be a mature adult about these things doesn't have a rat's ass to do with it, either, Slug-O. So, unless you met your bride-to-be at a family reunion, forget about that fun kegger wedding/reception combo at the VFW done in the colors of the Green Bay Packers. Any guy who's ever gotten married without his wife's father standing nearby with a shotgun knows that's got about as much chance of happening as you getting your own set of retractable, Adamantium claws like Wolverine.