Alex Goes Off!

Wedding Date

by Alexandra R. Yaremko

It's that time of year again. The time of year when every weekend could be spent at a wedding reception. Good, bad, or ugly, there are receptions you want to go to and receptions you have to go to. Then there are the rare occasions when the spheres of have to and want to overlap. The reception you won't miss. (Thank you in advance Beth Roethemeyer, aka "The Bride," for allowing us to share in your special day.)

Big weddings, like all events, require a great deal of planning. If you want your wedding to look effortless, you better have a plan. Attending a wedding also requires a great deal of planning. Like the bride, you better have the right dress and a good man. Or vice versa. Unlike the bride, you're not halfway there. Whichever half that may be. As Kim points out, "There is much work to be done here."

What you have are backups and vague notions. Sometimes a vague notion... doesn't exactly work. Backups for what to wear and who would make a good wedding date. Maybe good isn't the best word to describe the dress and date. Appropriate would be a better word. You want the right dress and the right date because if you have the wrong one of either, that's all you'll be thinking about the whole night.

Ironically, the dress and the wedding date have a lot in common. They tend to fall into one of two categories: they would either work well for the ceremony itself or for the reception after. You could always change dresses and dates between the ceremony and reception. This would be fun just to see if anyone notices. But it seems a little impractical. Finding one that works well for both is the trick. You want to have fun, so you better be comfortable. With both of your choices.

The wrong dresses are either too suit-like or too za-za-zing. The wrong dress requires a bra something along the lines of scaffolding. The wrong wedding date can also require scaffolding. If you're wearing the wrong thing or not with the right person, something in someway will have to be propped up.

The fun reception dates might not be responsible enough to make it to the church on time. The backup wedding dates that can sit through the ceremony might not be fun enough for the reception. You're going to know a lot of people. There's mingling involved. Your date has to be able to be left alone, not get bored, plus be this much entertaining with complete strangers. Or worse yet, with people you're related to. Which may be the same thing.

Then there are all of the subsequent questions. Do you have to keep dating after the wedding date just because one of your early dates was a wedding? Is it really fair to put someone you like enough to take to a wedding in this sort of situation in the first place? But then there's the question of all questions: why take a date at all? It's not as if you weren't going to have a good time, so why do it?

"You have to take a date," says Kim. "If there's dancing involved, we're at their mercy." "Their" mercy is all of the mothers and aunts who insist you dance. Here's the rub when dancing at weddings is involved. The mothers and aunts at these events are forever insisting you dance with the drunckles (the best new word in the English language, meaning perpetually drunken uncles, thank you Jason St. John, aka "The Groom") or gay closeted cousins. The aunts being the sisters of the closeted one, or something akin to that. Anyway, you get the picture. Don't take it personally. In the case of the drunkles and the gay cousins, what the mothers and aunts really mean (and sometimes unabashedly profess) with all of the pushing and pulling onto the dance floor is that they think what these men really need is a good woman. Congratulations. The mothers and aunts think you're just the woman for the job. For better or for worse.