We need to have a conversation about planning the ceremony,” I said to Mike one Saturday afternoon about a month after we’d returned from Iowa.
“You keep saying that,” he said, “but then you never actually start a conversation about planning the ceremony.” This was not an animadversion I could duck, because it was true; I never actually started a conversation about planning the ceremony.
“But that’s because before now we haven’t had enough books about planning ceremonies to make sure we did it right.” Things had gotten complicated enough, I felt, that Karen Bussen’s Simple Stunning Wedding Organizer was no longer enough on its own to guide me.
“And what’s different now?”
“While you were at the hardware store the guy came with my Amazon delivery.”
“Didn’t I forbid you to buy any more books?”
“Yes, but I didn’t listen.” I grabbed his hand and dragged him into the kitchen, where piles and piles of new wedding-planning books teetered dangerously on the counter.
“Okay, you definitely cannot buy any more books.”
“Whatever you say, honey.” We sat down and I grabbed a book at random and opened it. “You’ve got the ring and the man of your dreams,” I read, “and now it’s time to start planning the wedding—although if you’re like most women, you’ve been planning your wedding since you were a little girl. From the gorgeous gown and cascades of flowers to the perfect reception at the perfect location, you’ve envisioned your special day, right down to the very last detail.” I looked up at him. “See, that’s the problem.”
“What, that you’re not like most women?”
“Ha ha sort of,” I said. “I haven’t been planning my wedding since I was little. I never thought of marriage as part of my possible future. So I have no idea what I want to do for the ceremony. That’s why I’ve been avoiding trying to figure it out.”
And I meant it. The fantasies I had begun to entertain during puberty of the tall, well-muscled blond with whom I would fall in love at first sight, who would reciprocate that love, who would complete me, who would have me at hello, who would bear a striking resemblance to my computer science teacher, Mr. Russell—these fantasies had not included marriage, not in any serious way. Neither had the fantasies of the beefy brunet who had all the aforementioned virtues except he would bear a striking resemblance to David Hasselhoff (shut up, he was hot in the eighties).
Early in my junior year of college, one of my straight female friends called me to tell me she’d been dumped by her boyfriend of five years. Of course I ran over to her dorm room so we could glut ourselves with ice cream and cookies, and as we ate she talked about her ruined wedding fantasies. She would never have the dress that made her look fifteen pounds lighter, never have the organ playing the St. Anne Prelude and Fugue as she floated down the aisle, never assemble the bridal party in uncomfortable tuxedoes and impeccably tailored dresses that made all her bridesmaids look slightly less attractive than she did. I listened sympathetically and at appropriate moments spit vile imprecations at the reprobate who had thrown her over, because I am a good friend and because to pass up an opportunity to glut myself with ice cream and cookies would be foolish, but, although I knew far too well the pain of being dumped, there was a very real way in which I just didn’t get any of the wedding-of-my-dreams stuff. These were ideas to which I had never assigned any emotional weight, because any such assignment would have been a waste of energy; it couldn’t end in anything but disappointment. So while I understood my friend’s pain, its source was a black box, enigmatic and impenetrable.
And now, as an adult, I had spent the last seven years in confusion about when Mike and I ought to celebrate our anniversary. Our first date? That would be February 11. Our first date a year later the second time around, after, having dumped him, I came to my senses and asked him out again and he was fool enough to say yes? That would be November 9. The day I told him I loved him? That depends whether you count the first time, when I followed it immediately with “more than the Internet” (October 6), or the time I said it without qualification (God only knows; this was obviously far too momentous an occasion for me to remember its date). If we had been a married heterosexual couple, it would have been easy: we’d celebrate our anniversary on the date of our wedding. But as same-sexers, try as we might, we hadn’t been able to jury-rig an acceptable substitute. (If we’d been an unmarried heterosexual couple we might still have been in the same discomfiting position, but it would be by our choice, and if we got sick of confusion there would have been a quick remedy.)
So how could I know what I wanted out of a wedding if marriage equality was something that for most of my life I’d thought of—if I’d thought of it at all—in the same way I’d thought of the Easter Bunny or the spine of the Democratic Party: something that people have fun talking about but that doesn’t actually exist? How was I to decide whether I wanted a small, tasteful wedding in a quiet hall somewhere or a lavish spectacle in the Parthenon?
“Well, okay,” said Mike. “What do we know?”
“We know that we’re wearing morning clothes.”
We knew that we were wearing morning clothes—that is, tails, waistcoat, and maybe even top hat—because I wanted my wedding to be as formal as possible. (Tuxedos with black tie were originally what one wore for occasions on which informal dress was called for, and tuxedos with white tie and tails for more formal occasions, though irrespective of the color of the tie tuxedos were only for the evening—it would have been the height of gaucherie to wear a tuxedo of any sort during the daytime. But the world has moved on since then, and if we no longer give babies laudanum to make them stop crying and go to sleep then I suppose fashion too must keep pace with the times.) I intended to avoid any and all innovations, personalizations, and cute touches. My wedding would be devoid of whimsy.
“I don’t get it,” Mike had said when I first explained this to him. “Why is it so important to you to wear morning clothes?”
I couldn’t answer him for the life of me, so I distracted him by accidentally on purpose spilling strawberry jam on his shirt; once I removed it—the shirt, that is, not the jam—the afternoon proceeded as one might expect.
But I’ve thought about it a lot in the years since this conversation, and I believe there are a few reasons it mattered so much to me. First of all, as an ardent devoté of Miss Manners, I believe with her that there is a “difference between making an occasion enjoyable and making a significant event into a mockery.” I once went to a commitment ceremony where the two grooms exchanged butt plugs instead of rings. And I had a great time, as did everybody else, but if I was demanding the right to participate in a ritual that would transform me in the eyes of the society I lived in, and then when I won it I made fun of it, then as far as I was concerned I was either a hypocrite (oh, I never thought it was actually that important) or a morass of self-loathing (I don’t deserve the real thing, so I’m going to adulterate it). Of course I am a hypocrite and a morass of self-loathing, but I saw no reason to make those character traits public.
Or maybe it would be better to think in philosopher Walter Kaufmann’s terms. “The absence of all ritual,” he writes in Faith of a Heretic, “would entail nearly total blindness to the mysteries of this world, while ritual provides occasions when one regularly tries to listen for the voice that the rest of the time one is prone to forget.” How would I be able to hear that voice if I was busy working my vows as stand-up comedy? How could I attend to any mystery if I was worried about whether my dog the ring-bearer would be able to trot down the aisle without stopping to poop?
Comedy is the other side of tragedy; neither can exist without the other. And if there was one moment to protect from the intrusion of tragedy—and therefore from the intrusion of comedy—it was the instant in which I became one with my fiancé. If anything was sacred in the world, then I wanted that moment to be sacred. And humans are slow creatures, so before we arrived at that moment we would need a while to calm down and stop giggling and make room for what might allow us, in however clumsy and clay-footed a way, to transcend ourselves.
That was why we were wearing morning clothes at my wedding.
And as I think about it now, there was another reason, too, one that has to do with the infantilization of same-sexers I’ve discussed. If marriage equality is in some ways about the right to be held to just as high a standard as straight people, then I wanted to set that standard as high as I possibly could and to celebrate its Olympian loftiness. By refusing to accede to any dilutions of the ritual, I could show my refusal to accede to any dilutions of the responsibility I was asking to assume.
“We also know,” I said, straightening one of the piles of wedding-planning books that seemed on the verge of collapse, “that we’re getting married outside.”
When we first started talking about a wedding, years before the actual proposal, I told Mike that my dream location was St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, but I acknowledged that the Catholic Church was unlikely to be brought to its senses while I was still of marriageable age. My worries about the degree of resistance of the Catholic Church took a back seat, however, when Mike told me about his dream wedding, for which we wore shorts and T-shirts. As to a location, when I mentioned St. Mark’s he laughed condescendingly and said, “No, silly. We’re going to go to a forest upstate and get married in a clearing.”
I was dismayed. I hate nature; as far as I’m concerned, if you are overwhelmed by a compulsion to look at trees, the Internet provides innumerable opportunities, and if that’s not enough you can buy a calendar. I had long since learned, however, that one of Mike’s many flaws was a weakness for things that photosynthesize, and I knew from painful experience that an argument from emotion would hold little weight with him. In my mental flailing I finally decided that the practical route was the way to go: raise enough logistical objections, reasonably enough, and he would be forced to abandon his lunacy. “But where will the food be for the reception?” I said calmly.
“It’ll be off to the side, on tables. We’ll eat buffet-style.”
“And where will our guests sit?” I asked.
“People will just stand in a circle.”
“No one is standing in a circle at my wedding.” I felt desperation beginning to mount and had to work hard to keep it out of my voice. “If we’re getting married outdoors, we’re bringing chairs for the guests.”
“Oh, come on. They can sit if you want them to, but we don’t have to bring chairs.”
“Really? Then where will they sit?” It was very difficult by now to keep from shrieking.
“On the beautiful green earth.”
I’m not making this up. He actually said “on the beautiful green earth.” And he sort of meant it, too. He was teasing me, but he actually would have been happy with a wedding at which everybody sat on the ground. It drove me crazy. Who thinks a wedding is about stupid crap like community and togetherness and love?
After excruciating hours of back and forth we were eventually able to find a compromise: I said I would be willing to get married outside if he was willing to wear morning clothes. This would give the event the solemnity without which I couldn’t participate, while at the same time fulfilling Mike’s inexplicable desire to involve dirt. Relieved thus to have averted catastrophe, I said, “Okay, next question: what kind of invitations are we going to send?”
“Oh, we won’t,” he said.
“Then how,” I said nervously, “will our friends know about the wedding?”
“We’ll just tell them.”
“It’s at moments like this that I really wish I drank.”
“If you want, we can send out an Evite.”
“I rue the day I laid eyes on you.”
“Me, too, honey.”
In the end, the list Mike and I came up with that day in the kitchen, following the instructions of my new library of weddingplanning books, looked like this:
Wedding To-Do List
Conversations about morning clothes and forests were all very well and good when the wedding was simply a matter of theory; now that theory was heading toward practice, however, I thought, girding my loins in preparation for the battle that choosing the right outdoor venue for the ceremony would involve, the story might be different. And then Mike said, “Why don’t we have the wedding outside at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden?” and I said, “Sure, why not?” and that was that.
My lack of imaginative history when it came to weddings gave me an advantage, it was turning out; all I knew was that we were having our wedding in an outdoor grand location, but beyond that I had no specifics in mind, so the first outdoor grand location Mike came up with, a garden world-famous for its miles and miles of beautifully cultivated flowers, was absolutely fine by me. Shocked at the lack of further conflict, I ungirded my loins, but I decided to keep the greaves nearby, in case not all our decisions would be made this easily.
According to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s website, chairs were not allowed at ceremonies conducted outside. Since as I’ve already made clear I had no intention of allowing my wedding guests to sit on the earth, its beauty and/or greenness notwithstanding, they would have to stand, which necessity would have the salutary effect, I realized, of making the wedding very, very short—fifteen minutes, twenty tops, and then back to our house for the party.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s website went on to explain that wedding ceremonies on its grounds were held at 9:00 a.m., which I was willing to accept even though I thought it was an uncivilized hour because it meant that afterward we could serve people champagne and cake rather than much more expensive hard liquor and actual food, and limited to sixty guests, which answered for me the question of small and tasteful vs. lavish spectacle. I was uncomfortable doing things in this manner, because I felt one ought to draw up the guest list first and then find a venue that would fit everybody rather than the other way around, but once again my wedding-fantasy-less upbringing stymied me, because I’d never thought about who I wanted to invite in the first place.
So, improperly prioritized as it might have been, I decided to cling to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, because it was one of the only measures of stability I’d found so far.
Wedding To-Do List
The decision about the date proved unexpectedly easy to make when, looking over the list of when the Garden was available we found the striking option of 10/10/10. The insufferable cuteness was not a thing we could resist, so we had a wedding date, as well as a guarantee that neither one of us would ever forget our anniversary.
“That date is good,” I said, “because it’s on a Sunday, and Jewish weddings are never on Saturday.”
“We’re having a Jewish wedding?”
“Oh, my God! Something else I knew I wanted for the wedding! And I didn’t even realize I’d known it! Except, crap, honey, we need to discuss this. What kind of wedding do you think we should have?”
“Sure, a Jewish wedding is fine, whatever you want.”
I looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘Sure, a Jewish wedding is fine, whatever you want’?”
“Look, don’t turn into Groomzilla. It just doesn’t really matter to me.”
So we sat down to make a sixty-person guest list, which dropped to thirty once we’d taken care of family. This made things tricky, because if we limited the list to truly, deeply close friends, there would probably be ten, and if we expanded it to just plain good friends, there would be a hundred. Finally, though, after several evenings of complicated chart-making, we had what seemed a good collection of people.
Wedding To-Do List
For a man who hasn’t been to synagogue since 2002, when I went to New York’s gay synagogue one Friday night to meet men and was horrified to find everybody actually paying attention to the liturgy instead of cruising, I am surprised sometimes by the ferocity with which I identify as Jewish. It can’t spring from any kind of relationship with God, since I am as certain that there is no God as I am that I am a biped, and if I believed there were a God I would bend all my will to seeing Him prosecuted for what He’d done to the world. My sense of Jewish identity can’t be founded on an idea of community, since when I’m around too many Jews for too long I find myself getting angry in the same way I do around too many white gay men, only the question in this case is some variant of HillaryorObamawho’sbetterfortheJews. I suppose my vigor could stem from pride in being part of a group associated with valuing knowledge and inquiry, but somehow that seems a little weak.
What I do know is that, for me, one of the most important aspects of being Jewish is being not Christian—in other words, being part of a minority. I’m not planning on having children, since I hate and fear them, but I’ve always said that if I did by some unfortunate chance come into possession of a child I would insist on raising it Jewish so that it knew what being an outsider felt like. This would be a way, as I see it, of guaranteeing a sense of compassion.
Given this awareness unaccompanied by a corresponding conscious understanding, I suspected that before I planned a wedding ceremony I ought to find out more about what the whole thing meant. I knew you needed a chuppah (wedding canopy) and you stomped on a glass at the end, but other than that I was a blank slate.
“Who should officiate?” I asked Mike.
“Whoever you want,” he said.
“How about Rabbi Rachel?”
“Ooh, I like her.”
I called Rachel and left her a message asking her whether she could perform our ceremony, oh and by the way what the hell did we need in our ceremony?
Wedding To-Do List
“We have everything we need as far as material possessions,” I said to Mike.
“Well, our own private island.”
“Or Karl Rove’s head on a platter.”
“I don’t think anybody we’re inviting could afford that.”
“So I think we should have our guests contribute to charity instead,” I offered.
“That’s a nice idea.”
“The problem is that we’re not allowed to tell them this.”
“Hunh?”
It’s true. If anybody asks, you’re allowed to say, oh, really, we don’t want anything, we’d prefer to share our happiness with others less fortunate, can you make a donation to your favorite charity in our honor instead? But if they don’t ask, you’re not allowed to say, “Oh, by the way, if you’re thinking of buying us a wedding gift, we’d prefer that you make a donation to charity,” because then you’re letting people know you expect them to buy you a gift, which is rude.
I thought for a few days about this and finally remembered the scheme my friend Julia came up with when she was planning her wedding some years ago and found herself face to face with the same problem, so I chose, as has often been the case, to take advantage of my friend’s cleverness. I would have one of our guests email all the other guests saying he or she suspected that instead of gifts what we really wanted was donations to charity.
Though I also decided to keep my eye out for any store that offered Karl Rove’s head for sale, in which case I would change my mind at once.
Wedding To-Do List
A Jewish wedding, Rachel explained when she called to say yes, is a fairly straightforward affair. Not even the glass-stomping is required. The only part that’s absolutely necessary is the signing of the ketubah—more or less a pre-nup that makes the wedding official. But there are also a number of other traditions commonly included, of which the chuppah and the glass-stomping are two:
The reason the ceremony is usually held under a chuppah is to symbolize that the whole thing is taking place in the house of the Big Guy upstairs. I asked my friend Michelle, whose wedding took place under the most gorgeous chuppah I’ve ever seen—her mother had commissioned it for the occasion—whether we could borrow it, and she said she’d be thrilled.
One decision made.
The bride often circles the groom either three or seven times. Three symbolizes the three virtues of marriage (righteousness, justice, and lovingkindness); seven is the Biblical number of perfection—God built the world in seven days, so you were building your own world for the two of you, though it was unclear to me why the woman had to do all the work. As far as the number, I liked the extravagance of seven but I worried about getting dizzy. Rachel suggested that each of us do three circles around the other and then one together in opposite directions, which I couldn’t really picture, because I have a bad sense of spatial dynamics, but I trusted her.
The bride’s face is often completely covered with a veil, which the groom lifts before signing the ketubah. This is because Jacob the Biblical patriarch, after he had worked for Rebecca’s father Laban for seven years, didn’t check to make sure it was Rebecca he was marrying; he paid a great deal for this lack of foresight, because sneaky Laban made a last-minute switch with his older daughter, Leah, and it was her that Jacob actually married, which meant that, in order to marry Rachel, Jacob had to put in another seven years working for Laban. The unveiling was ultimately worked into the standard wedding ceremony to protect grooms from the treachery of their wily fathers-in-law.
I did not wish to wear a veil.
My wily, treacherous father’s vision was so bad, furthermore, that, if he tried to fool Mike by substituting my brother for me, he would have no idea whether or not he’d succeeded, or probably whether he’d even started with me in the first place, so there was really no point.
The groom usually gives the bride a ring and says, “Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring according to the law of Moses and Israel.” Mike was not Jewish, however, despite being something of a matzah queen, and had therefore no cause to do anything according to the law of Moses and Israel.
On the to-think-about list.
The last thing that happens under the chuppah is a set of seven blessings, pronounced sometimes by the person performing the ceremony, sometimes by seven different wedding guests. So we had to figure out whether these should be in English or Hebrew, or whether in fact we should have them at all.
This was a little overwhelming, especially since all Mike would say whenever I asked him about any of it was that he was fine with whatever I decided.
Wedding To-Do List
Mike and I have mutually exclusive vacation styles: he likes to walk around and see sights, while I like to stay in the hotel room and read and sleep and watch TV. (I don’t know whether this is a Jewish thing or a my-family thing. But my brother, the last time somebody invited him to go camping, said, “Camping was what people did before we had air conditioning and cable,” and I’m with him 100 percent.) There was, however, an obvious compromise: a Caribbean cruise would allow Mike to do the former and me to do the latter, with a little flexibility in case either one of us wanted to break character.
As I sent Mike email after email about various cruises I found online, however, trying to determine which one would be the best choice, his replies got both fewer and more annoyed.
“Look,” he finally wrote. “I don’t care. You just decide.”
Okay, I thought. But this is starting to feel weird.
Wedding To-Do List
It was when I started looking for a ketubah, the one absolute requirement of a Jewish wedding, that things started to fall apart.
A disappointing majority of the ketubahs I saw online were really unattractive. They were all in dull or dark browns or reds or blues, and the backgrounds were almost universally Sean Cody beige, which I thought was inappropriate for a document that purported to bind me to a man with a last name. (Sean Cody, for those of you who don’t know, runs a website featuring muscular young men identified only by monikers like “Dakota” and “Bryce” having sex with each other in rooms so drably painted and cheerlessly appointed that they make the activity one engages in while watching them so dreary it’s almost impossible to complete.)
I found a few websites that had absolutely gorgeous ketubahs, but the problem here was that I knew Mike would hate the ones I loved because they were too whimsical or too extravagant or too purple. At one point I thought we’d finally found the answer, because I showed Mike a very attractive blue ketubah from ketubahworks.com and he said, “Oh, that’s really nice!” in a tone of voice that made it sound like he really meant it, so I figured the search was over, but then a couple weeks later I told somebody on the phone that we’d picked a ketubah and after I hung up Mike was like, “What do you mean, we’ve picked a ketubah?” and I showed him the one he’d said was really nice and he said, “I’ve never seen that before and I hate it.” No matter how vehemently I insisted to him that he’d said differently before, he refused to believe me. It was just like when he’d denied saying he was too busy to do couples therapy and our failure to continue was actually my fault. I wondered whether I ought to be worried about early-onset Alzheimer’s.
But one Thursday I finally found a ketubah website that I liked (mpartworks.com/ketubah_studio.htm) and that I thought he might like too. “The ketubahs on here are gorgeous,” I wrote in an email I sent to him along with the URL. “Are there any that you particularly like?”
Three days later, he still hadn’t responded. Finally on Sunday night over dinner I said, “So have you looked at the ketubahs on the website I emailed you?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t had time. I’ve been really busy at work.” Not this weekend, you haven’t, I thought. “I’ll look at them soon, I promise.”
When I asked again on Wednesday, he said, “Would you stop badgering me about it? I’ll get to it.”
“When?”
“When I get to it.”
“Fine. We’ll do what you want and just leave it until the last minute and—”
“What I want,” said Mike, “is to be involved in the process of planning this wedding without having to discuss every single detail of every single decision with you for an hour.”
“It might help if you ever bothered to tell me a single thing about what you have in mind.”
“Fine. I’ll look at them later tonight.”
He didn’t.
“Why,” he said when he got home the next day, tense, “is there a message from a caterer on our voicemail confirming a meeting with you tomorrow?”
“Oh, I called Cathy’s friend Marcus to talk to him about catering the party.”
Irritation flooded his voice. “And you were going to tell me this when?”
“What? I figured you’d want me to take care of it.”
“Oh, my God. Can you not tell the difference between things that are important and things that aren’t?”
“That’s it,” I said. “We’re going to couples therapy.”