• Fianceé's obsession with details in wedding planning gives bachelor the jitters
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Diary,
I’ve always hated the idea of weddings. I know, I know. Pretty hypocritical coming from a guy preparing for one, but when it comes down to it, Indians have weddings down pat.
If you’re going to make the most dramatic change in your life (and not always for the better, mind you) you might as well party for three days. Sometimes five, if you have anything close to Elon Musk money.
Much as I dislike marriages, people put too much stock in a wedding ceremony. Some couples take years planning for an occasion that would take less than six hours of one day. Some have even broken up in the process, unable to contend with the stress that comes with it. Others borrowed so heavily they ended up burdened by debt for the duration of their marriage.
If you think these are extremes, my fiancée Ms Harper has been planning hers for the last 15 years. I had no idea how consuming it was until we got engaged (against my better judgment and all that I hold dear). Prior to my proposal, I had seen Harper as the best thing to have happened since someone decided to sell mutura and call it smokie. This wedding planning process has brought out a beast I never knew existed in her.
She’s mad over the tiniest details — her dress isn’t the exact colour she wants (there are apparently more than 100 shades of white and she’s partial to “Cornsilk”), her preferred bridesmaids have either put on too much weight or bushed their figures by having babies, no weatherman will guarantee an exact prediction of the wedding day weather (including the precise time the sun will set when she’s supposed to toss the bouquet), et cetera. All this has me worried about what sort of life we could have together.
As an omen, after the recent floods destroyed our flat, we’re still sleeping on a crate and have stools and a rickety table for furniture because Harper can’t find anything in the market that’s good enough for our house. She prefers something called handmade “German Baroque”.
I had to look it up online and to me, the couch looks like something you’d find growing in an enchanted forest, covered in ivies and bathed in light by a Hollywood film crew. The only genuine fella who does this art is in a town called Quedlinburg and is fully booked for the next two years.
You see where I’m going with this, right? At this rate, I’m wondering what a wrong turn during our wedding, like me fudging a line during the vows (or peeing myself, which is within the realm of possibility), could mean for the rest of our marriage. And, frankly, the prognosis doesn’t look too rosy.