I love my fiance but GOD, he's such a fucking GUY. It seems like all the wedding planning stuff ALWAYS FALLS TO ME. He says things like "Oh but honey, you're so good at it." Why won't he help me!? -Jen

Jen, this is a perennial question, and it seems to be almost as much of an issue with offbeat grooms as for more, well, stereotypical ones.

I wish I could completely skip over the gender issue on this one, but I have to at least acknowledge it. I don't know what there is to say about the fact that some men don't enjoy planning weddings. Is it an embodiment culture-driven gender influences? Probably. Could your guy be lazy? Maybe. Is making gender generalizations about it self-reinforcing these very gender influences you're decrying? Most likely. Are there lesbian couples who deal with this same interest-in-wedding-planning imbalance who don't reduce it to a gender issue? Yes.

We could debate why it happens and what it means and who's to blame for a long time. But really, that's not accomplishing much — what can you actually DO about it? What can you actually LEARN from it?

Continue reading "Acknowledging and learning from partnership imbalances OR "My stupid fiance won't help me with wedding planning"" →

One thing that is freaking me out at the moment is when I hear of friend and friends of friends, who marry after being together for 7-8 years, but end up divorced after the first year or so. This terrifies me, as I really want to get/stay happily married, but I wonder why this happens … when people are together for ages, get married and then split. What causes this….? -jan

It's absolutely not uncommon at all: longtime partners who are together for years decide to get married, and then almost immediately decide to get divorced. What's going on? Could this happen to you? Or me? Or any of us?

Obviously, there's no way for us to ever know exactly what makes individual couples split up. But when it comes to this trend, I've got a theory…

Continue reading "Why do longtime partners split after getting married?" →

My darling fiance and I are going to be building our wedding from the ground up, and as a fellow obsessive planner, I'm enthralled to inject our personalities into every aspect of the ceremony. The only problem is this: I can't get him to offer much input, as his response tends to be "It's your day, and as long as we're married at the end, you can do whatever you want." That's sweet, I guess, but it's not MY day, it's OUR DAY! How can I get him involved in the planning without making him feel forced or out of his element? -Jess

This is an awesome opportunity for the two of you to sit down and reconstruct the whole "This is the bride's special daaaaaay, and the groom is just an accessory" bullshit. Your marriage is about the two of you, and your wedding should be about the two of you, too. Many men are raised to believe that weddings simply are a woman's place — that they owe it to their fiances and everyone else to just sit quietly and nod. That they have no right to have opinions.

That's bullshit: you're setting up dynamics for your marriage with your wedding, and each partner needs to ask themselves "Do I want quietly nodding to be the dynamic of this relationship?"

Then again, you can't make your fiance care about certain aspects of the wedding that may not interest him…

Continue reading "Getting your offbeat groom involved" →

Welcome to OMGOBT, a new category of posts on Offbeat Bride that feature some of the most inspiring, most helpful, and most awesome posts from the OBT. This first installment involves love and cat vomit, and is by OBT user Cassie.

So the other day I was looking at my cat. More specifically, I was looking at my cat as she spewed what seemed like a quarter pound of half-digested tuna/chicken feast all over one of my favorite sweaters, which I stupidly left unsupervised on the bed. And I thought, "Sweet lord above this cat is driving me crazy, what with all the puking and crapping lately, but I love her to bits and wouldn't give her up for anything."

And here is where the most pathetic realization came over me: My relationship with my future husband is like my relationship to the cat …

Continue reading "How my cat taught me marriage isn't so scary after all, by Cassie" →