It’s looking like getting engaged a few weeks ago is going to make the next 12 months of my life pretty busy planning a wedding. Who knew? That just means you’re likely to see some wedding-themed blogs popping up every now and then. I can’t imagine this planning is going to go very smoothly so tune into the blog to see the trials & tribulations of a guy who has no business planning a wedding. Should be fun for everyone but me.

Let’s kick this new wedding section off with a quick list of observations from the first 21 days of being engaged.

1. The normal first interaction with someone after you’ve gotten engaged is about seven seconds of congratulations followed by seven minutes of questions. “Oh my god, Congratulations! I’m so happy for you…Do you know where you’re gonna have the wedding? What month? How big is it gonna be? What type of venue are you looking at? Are you gonna wear a tux or a suit?” Jesus, lady, give us a minute to finish having engagement sex before you barge in with all these questions that we haven’t even come close to thinking about yet.
2. Within the first few days of getting engaged, your fiancee’s family will have told you repeatedly how happy they are that this is happening and how their daughter couldn’t have found a better man. No matter what you fuck up over the next 30-40 years, you’ll always have this to point to whenever her parents are saying things like, “I don’t know why you ever married this loser in the first place.”
3. While it’s not fair to hold “I spent X thousand dollars for that tiny piece of jewelry on your finger” over her head for eternity, it certainly should buy you a lot of leeway, rapid forgiveness and some get out of jail free cards for at least a few months after the engagement (And now people will realize why I planned my engagement just six weeks before the start of the NFL season…all the TVs in the house are now mine on Sundays).
4. Over these first few weeks, at least a couple people will tell you how excited they are for your wedding next year, and you’ll get to share a brief evil laugh with your fiancee after that person walks away because there isn’t a single scenario in which you’d actually be inviting these people.
5. Celebrations galore. Everyone wants to celebrate your engagement. And who are you to say no to a nice dinner, a round of drinks or an engagement party? Let them spoil you. You only get married a few times.
6. As the man in the relationship and the person with the awesome sense of humor, you’ll be making tasteless wedding jokes to your fiancee for the better part of the next year. Get it started immediately. When she says you need to eventually register at Crate & Barrel and Macy’s, tell her that’s fine, but she should remember you want to register on these websites too: http://www.golfsmith.com & http://www.mancrates.com/shop
7. I’ll hand it to my fiancee. She seems more than willing to accommodate my insane obsession with the NFL and has agreed to not purposely schedule any wedding planning stuff on Sundays from September – January. But I’m already stressing about that random weekend where a venue or caterer or someone can only meet on Sunday and I have to look like the world’s biggest dickhead while I try to convince her to go without me (my strategy so far has been to put A LOT of work into this wedding planning thing before the NFL season kicks off so that she’ll hopefully remember my efforts and let me skip a meeting or 12 during the season).
8. The speed at which “a perfect wedding” fades away as soon as you start looking into prices is incredible. The dream is to have the most beautiful venue, amazing food, top shelf open bar, the greatest party DJ, perfect decorations and flowers…and then you quickly say, “An above average venue with edible food, well-level liquor, decorations from Party Center and someone who knows how to press play on iTunes will do.”
9. A heads-up for the men: When you start looking at venues, try not to get offended by the wedding planners/coordinators completely ignoring you. I mean completely. We had one woman showing us around a venue who exclusively started sentences with, “I’ve had brides do [fill in the blank].” She never once looked at me. I was invisible. She made it sound like no man has ever contributed to the planning of a wedding. Don’t be upset about this because it might just work as a nice subliminal message to your fiancee that she’s in charge, meaning she’s doing all the work.
10. Last but not least: I highly recommend getting a degree in advanced accounting before you embark on wedding planning. You will be immediately bombarded by options, fees, taxes, what’s included, what’s not included, what to calculate on a per person basis vs what’s a flat fee, upgrades, per hour extensions, etc, etc, [picture me miming the act of blowing my brains out with a shotgun and you’ll get my point].