He finally popped the question… What NOW?

It’s January again. For many that means the start of a new year and all the little excitements that come with starting anew, from buying a new “Hunks on Parade” calendar to activating that new gym membership which will be used twice to finding someplace to unceremoniously dump the now highly-flammable Christmas tree.

But for some, January means panic, because their boyfriend of many years (er… fiancé) finally grew a pair.

Perhaps you knew it was coming for a long time. Perhaps you never thought he’d manage it. Perhaps you had a ring set away so you could tell him to do it. Perhaps you had hired goons to do the same. But now it finally happened. You’re engaged, and it’s January. You’re now officially a target market.

The site onewed.com promises to give help you chose from 200,000 vendors. It sounds wonderful to have all those options, but who really wants to look through all those listings? Their wedding guide (designed, they say, to save you from being deluged with wedding advice) is 8 pages of dense type, with rows of checklists, subtitled “Loving (and surviving) Your Big Day.”

I don’t know how you feel, but adopting a survivalist’s attitude isn’t what I had in mind when walked down the aisle. Granted, I had a dagger stuffed in my sock, but that was just because it looks silly not to while wearing a kilt.

What I’m saying is that all these sites and vendors (including yours truly) succeed by convincing you that this is all very grave, important business. They do the same thing to those of us out there trying to strongarm you into hiring us. The unspoken message is: “if anything goes wrong, the marriage will fail.”

And for the amount of money you’re likely to shell out, that argument is pretty convincing. But in reality the two of you could hop on a plane, fly to Vegas and find an Elvis impersonator and have just as good a chance of beating the odds. Hopefully the reason you’re throwing a bash and inviting friends to the party is that you want to have a great time and share the experience. Don’t let the Wedding Industrial Complex convince you to do things you don’t want. Use them as resources, but don’t let them push you around. If you want a bonfire on the beach, do it. If you want the Four Seasons Hotel, do it. Just do it on your own terms.

Recently I shot a wedding where the couple decided to buck the trend. Their families lived on different continents and hadn’t met, so they borrowed a friend’s cabin in the mountains and brought the families and a few select friends for the weekend. The ceremony was on the deck on the second day, timed in between sporadic rain showers. They had ribs for dinner (white dress be damned) and stayed up until the wee hours playing Trivial Pursuit. It was one of the most beautiful weddings I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend, and absolutely nobody freaked out about schedules.