elise mac adam
When I got engaged, I was excited to get married. I loved my fiancé, but something strange happened. I began to have wedding nightmares. My night sweats had nothing to do with second thoughts or waning passion. My dreams stemmed from the sinking feeling that I wasn't the kind of girl who could pull off a wedding. In the dark I would obsess over family dynamics, thinking of the many ways I could offend or alienate my dearest friends and family members at my upcoming nuptials.
Would my friends hate me if I didn't invite any children? Would I fail the Mrs. or Ms. test when addressing invitations to people I didn't know and get accused either of being conservative or inflicting my liberal politics on people? Was it rude to accept generous offers of assistance? Or was I supposed to gently demur? How could I decline when I needed help quite urgently?
Then I remembered Miss Manners and her Gentle Reader, the salutation which she had used since her first etiquette column was published in 1978.
There was salvation. Rules, the more rigid the better, would rescue me. Faced with two families and the threat of embarrassment, I embraced the rules and mowed through my engagement like a visiting diplomat. I was a nervous student, consulting books while I composed invitations, planned the food (in spite of the fact that we served Italian food, and etiquette books tend to offer menus that can only be described as New England Civilized), and negotiated guest list intricacies. I set out to be as rigorous as possible. I didn't care if my rigidity seemed eccentric. Paying attention to rules that no one else would notice felt virtuous, like running extra miles or forgoing an ice-cream sandwich.
It was a crutch, sure, and it only took a few weeks to learn that adopting stiff policies was going to make me utterly insufferable if I didn't bend—without giving in to decadence, of course. Learn, then, from my near follies.
How hard is it to compose an invitation? It's a happy missive, usually greeted with smiles. In an urge to embrace everyone equally, I set about composing something all-inclusive, naming all parents. I submitted a few versions to my then-fiancé, my future mother-in-law, and my mother for approval and sighed with relief. Everything I wrote was satisfyingly traditional, verging on bland. What possible issues could there be?
Famous last words. My future mother-in-law preferred that she and her husband's names appear in the strict construction that only uses the husband's first name. My mother was quite emphatic that I use her whole name.
Such small details on a piece of stationery that only the most extreme nostalgia maniacs don't throw away, but so important. I examined scads of etiquette books and came up with solutions that included putting each set of parents' names in the format each preferred (symmetry be damned). I tried to unearth novel solutions (as if novelty would have helped), and I got more and more anxious, fretting about displeasing my fiancé's family and wounding my own.
And then my future mother-in-law, with one swift stroke, pulled the plug on my angst. “I like the traditional way best, with just the bride's parents' names. Those others just look so cluttered. The old-fashioned way just seems nicest. Don't you think?” There is nothing memorable about my wedding invitation (except perhaps the gray ink), but I can't think about it without being grateful to my mother-in-law's preferences and the peace I found in so-called stodgy tradition.
My etiquette love occasionally took masochistic turns. I couldn't stop measuring myself against a rigid standard and quickly became demonized over things like thank-you notes. Of course they had to be written, but I had to turn them around in twenty-four hours or else I'd wake up composing them before my alarm started blasting. In at least one instance I wrote a note before I had even figured out what the present was: “Thank you so much for the toucans. I can't wait to use them.”
Even my friend, beside whom I always fall short when it comes to efficiency, was forced to comment. “My parents got your note before they even knew the present had been sent. Are you getting enough rest?”
Not really. But I couldn't put on the brakes. Etiquette had me in its stranglehold. If I wrote the notes, and wrote them quickly with some degree of charm and inventiveness, I would forestall the threat of alienating anyone. Even putting stamps on my thank-you notes made me feel so pure and accomplished for having written them that I was almost at a loss when I didn't have to scratch one off. Fortunately, other tasks bubbled up to give me the opportunity to feel virtuous, or at least distracted.
The exquisite agony of thank-you-note writing was matched only by the pain of the seating plan. Reviled by many as annoyingly fascistic and parade-dampening, the seating plan exemplifies etiquette's invisible powers. Happy are the nuptials where there are no guests who could possibly be at odds with each other or capable of being insulting. At my wedding, we had a few cases of more than simple distaste, one long-settled but still bitter divorce, and one pointed “everyone would be happier if you kept these two apart” scenario. (I also had to put a fair amount of work into diluting what threatened to become the Dud Table.)
Creating a seating plan for eighty people is like an excruciatingly long LSAT problem: “Sam won't sit next to Myrtle and Sheila can't sit next to anyone wearing black. If there are ten people at each table, who will be on Sam's left?”
It took a week of heavy contemplation to finalize the seating (after which, naturally, a few people couldn't come, and the musical chairs sound track started all over again). I knew well enough to separate the divorced couple and to seat the members of a failed fix-up at different tables. But when I presented my plans to my future mother-in-law, stories of small resentments among people practically unknown to me poured out, and balancing tables for maximum peace and entertainment proved tricky with all of the additional restrictions. All this work still didn't ward off all strangeness. One guest showed up without his wife (she was in India), so I seated him near an old female friend of his. This led to an interesting moment in which another guest attacked him for publicly flaunting what she assumed was an affair. In the end, I was so thrilled to have seated everyone, I didn't even care that some couples rearranged things so that they could be closer to their spouses. It may have been naughty, but it was out of my control.
Even though my obsession with comportment bordered on the obsessive-compulsive, don't think my relationship with etiquette was all hearts and pearls. Pre-wedding, my apartment became an etiquette farm. I couldn't stop collecting books on manners. If something stumped me, I had a tendency to leave a pile of texts lying open to key pages and sadly prone to the eager jaws of our young cairn terrier, who would shred them. (A 1924 volume of Lillian Eichler was a particularly tragic casualty.)
Paradoxically, the more one tries to be “by the book” (any book, all books), the more one will second-guess oneself. Consider the ubiquitous response cards that you stuff into invitations, hoping your guests will check a box or jot a note and let you know whether or not to expect them. They are, as it turns out, far from traditional, because back when these bits of behavior first calcified, prospective guests knew that the only thing to do with an invitation was to send back a handwritten note saying whether or not they'd be attending. I got stuck. Should I count on my guests knowing to get back to me themselves? That would be the absolutely most correct thing to do and I was nothing if not accurate. But in the modern world, you have to demand a reply or no one will say anything, and response cards only go so far anyway. I sent mine out and still had to do a round of uncomfortable phone calls, asking people what their plans were for a certain Saturday in January. It doesn't matter how gentle you are, dear Reader, some guests are going to need a poke.
And there's still no doing everything right (or “right,” since etiquette is sometimes relative). Because it isn't traditional, and my childhood favorite, Miss Manners, says it's appalling, I decided not to register. Which was worse, refusing to register and annoying everyone or violating a code of manners that only a few people even know exists?
When everyone from my oldest friend's parents to my mother-in-law's cousin insisted on registry information, I had to bend my rules again. In a fit of capitalist optimism, my fiancé and I signed up for useful kitchen items that promised to renovate my culinary skills. This wasn't good enough. There were protests that kitchen items were too practical. I added some flatware. Complaints came in that my choices weren't complete. In the end, most people gave the presents they felt like giving, but, in hindsight, given the fact that our terrier nipped my in-laws' poodle while we were cutting the wedding cake, it would have been wise to have registered for some (more) obedience lessons.
My mother, a woman whose reluctance to make decisions should qualify her for a government job, realized a little late in the game that she wanted to invite a few more people. Like a jerk, I balked because those invitations would be going out late and this lateness would be seen as insulting.
I was terrified of the Killer B-list. Etiquette texts caution against it. And the B-list does seem mean, as if one has to wait for the more important people to bow out before one can fill tables with some also-rans. Of course, this wasn't the case at all. I didn't have severe space limitations; I just had a mother who got inclusive at the last minute.
But with weddings, appearances are often more memorable than substance (which is why guests will remember your wedding dress better than your tenderly written vows), and I was torn. Which risk was more perilous: offending the late invitees with a postmark too close to the RSVP date or denying my mother her friends?
For my mother, I shut up and mailed all of her invitations. Everyone came. No one noticed—or if they did they didn't snark.
I didn't pick my wedding dress. I had ideas, of course. I was planning to order something fabulous in pink from California. The appeal of getting something custom-made without having to leave my house had considerable appeal and seemed consistent with my family history.
My mother didn't choose her own wedding outfit. One of her father's patients created something for her: a Jackie-O-ish pink suit with gold buttons (no pillbox hat, but probably only because the whole event took place indoors in a high-rise on Manhattan's East End Avenue). My mother never had warm things to say about her suit, but she didn't seem to mind missing out on having to make that decision, and it seemed reasonable that she wouldn't have much to say about my choice.
But when she heard about my mail-order plans, my mother got strange. She wouldn't admit to feeling sad or left out, but something was wrong. I guiltily took her to a bridal store that was having a sale, and within minutes she popped up with a dress and a beaming saleswoman to hold it up to me. So much for thinking pink. My mother's selection was whitish, low-backed, scoop-necked, A-line, exquisite, and traditional. She was happy. How could I argue?
Etiquette is really about making everyone comfortable, and bending is occasionally wise, if not necessary. My dress wasn't nearly as important to me as it was to my mother. I didn't have to give in, but I did. And doing so was like having a get-out-of-jail free card in my back pocket. That one moment of generosity would buy me a chance to dig in my heels when I really needed it.
These moments made me realize that even etiquette has its practical limits. Living by the book (hell, living with the dog who ate the book) was creating impossible standards. And so I had to learn to read etiquette not as a fundamentalist with the Ten Commandments, but as a Supreme Court justice with some of the vaguer amendments.
“Strange” is the word that really says it all about modern weddings. After being rigorously taught about fighting to “have it all” and being pumped full of nuptial pornography in the form of can-do magazines and movie-star photo spreads, even the woman who never thought about her wedding dress and who always rolled her eyes at Pachelbel's Canon can find herself in a panic. It isn't that she doesn't want to get married. She just doesn't know what to do— because nothing, nothing feels natural.
How could it? All eyes are on the bride. Everyone's ready to compare her wedding to the scads of nuptials they've already attended, and she must take the feelings of two families into account, unless she is one of the very lucky few whose parents and future in-laws will be happy with anything, or nothing at all. (Where are these folks and what meds are they on?) Etiquette offers a snug structure that guides the confused and gives strong, firm answers to the most beleaguering problems. It's an unlikely life preserver in the harrowing seas of tulle.
For several years I've been writing about etiquette for the Web site Indiebride.com—answering plaintive queries almost daily. A lot of questions are standard: abused bridesmaids; couples who don't want to invite children; brides afraid of the spotlight; and people wondering if it's all right to ask for cash on invitations. (Nope!) Often, readers confuse etiquette advice with therapy, and either seek help on more fundamental problems or try to use it to get away with murder. Etiquette can tell you how to finesse the moment and avoid social upset, but it can't change the basics. You can't fire a bridesmaid because you don't like her figure, and if your father despises your fiancé, you'll still have to navigate that ugliness, after the pigeons have eaten up all the rice.
Etiquette is great at dictating the “how” of things. The books all come with charts and lists galore: bridesmaids' duties, items to include on registries, rehearsal protocol… you understand. But none of the tomes on my shelves— and some of them have been hanging around for hundreds of years—encourage you to think about the “whether” of things and reject elements that don't suit you. “Traditional” is not synonymous with “necessary.” Etiquette should sculpt your plans, not dictate them. You can learn all about bridesmaids, but no one ever says you don't have to have them. And you really don't.
For my part, nuptial tranquillity came to me, finally, when I rejected the traditions that simply weren't for me:
No bridesmaids
No shower
No aisle
No veil
No being given away
No father/daughter dance
No name change
No cake smash
No tossing (of bouquet, rice, garter, anything)
The photographs show a traditional wedding. I'm a bride in white(ish) with a tuxedoed husband. Everyone's smiling. The flowers my mother-in-law chose are gorgeous and only one centerpiece caught on fire. Underneath the charm were tremors of bad behavior, but all I knew was that the band was playing every song I wanted to hear and I was married to the man I had loved for so long.
Etiquette saved and tormented me, but it taught me perspective and showed me how to live in two families at once. It was good practice for the future. Now we are three (four, with the etiquette-book-eating terrier), and wedding etiquette is really a practice run for parenting etiquette, which more people should learn.
Unsolicited advice goes entirely against the tenets of good manners. So while you didn't ask for them, here are seven bits of etiquette advice that should make your nuptials, and even more quotidian moments, less fraught:
Pick a few nonnegotiables, elements that have to go your way, and don't budge on them. Since you're asking, I wanted to be married by a judge and would accept no substitutes when it came to music. I was married by Uncle Bob and serenaded by Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks, all the way up from Texas.
Be willing to compromise on everything else. My mother picked my dress for me and I can't fault her taste. There will always be time for pink.
Feed every guest and every vendor. Everyone needs to eat.
Don't ask for presents or money in your invitation. It looks either weird or mercenary.
If you don't get a present from someone, it's just as well. That's one thank-you note you don't have to write.
Weddings should offer more pleasure than pain. Stir the pot only if you have to. It was unwise, for instance, of my brother to tell my mother two days before my wedding that he thought her dress was too big. She has agonized over it ever since and memorably tried to fob it off on me as maternity evening wear.
Lapses in manners make for good stories. Let them happen, commit them to memory, and feel free to enjoy them (with the names changed to protect the guilty) at dinner parties for the rest of your life.