Wedding Planning--The Dress

After being engaged for more than a year and constantly trying to come up with new answers with the persistent probing of "Have you set the date yet?" I decided it's probably easier to start doing some work and just get it over with. (But then I'm sure people will start to ask a different set of questions just to annoy the heck out of me, like "When are you getting a baby?" Uhh... how about "it's none of your business")

And so it began. Honestly I never quite understand the whole excitement over a wedding thing. Don’t get me wrong. I love clothes and I love to look beautiful, and just like most of other girls, secretly I do crave for the undivided attention I would otherwise never gonna get. So there’s never gonna be a better time than this when I get to be the most beautiful girl for the day by default.

It didn’t take long for me to realize the tremendous amount of work involved for me to be perfect. There is the dress, the veil, the headpiece (or “tiara”, as they like to call it to make it sound more royal), the shoes, the purse, the jewelries, and don’t forget the hair and the makeup. But it wouldn’t work without everything else such as the dream ceremony site, the reception and the food, the flower, the music, the dance, among many other things. I soon forgot that it is about the celebration of unifying the two strangers who found each other, and not a beauty contest I was never going to win. There will always be someone at my wedding who just won’t like my dress, my hair, my cake (or me.) Unfortunately, for my guests to remember it as a celebration of unifying the two lovebirds and not a disaster they just can’t seem to not talk about, I still have to do much the work.

I cannot devote myself into much work, or any work really, if I don’t resolve this single most important element of the event—the dress. For someone who loves clothes so much, I actually think it is the one piece of clothing I don’t miss. You don’t have much choice to begin with (white or ivory? Polyester or silk? Wait, is that even a choice?), and then after spending all the headache to find it and be able to afford it (most of the ones I saw in magazines that don’t look like a supermarket plastic bag is like $4,000 or above), you wear it for like a day and then you have two options—you either throw away the dress you will never gonna wear again, or get ripped off one more time and spend $400 on average to preserve the dress you will never gonna wear again. The lady who works at David’s Bridal was trying to convince me that I can save the dress for another time. I don’t know what she’s smoking but it seemed good.

But anyone who has ever shopped with me would tell you this is going to be a long journey. Paul’s lovely cousin Shannon can probably tell you how I spent 30 minutes choosing between $4 for 5 fabric headbands and $2 for 2 faux-leather headbands at Target. (It is that difficult I tell you!) So who would know that after visiting two stores and trying on 4 dresses, I have already bought my wedding dress, within 15 days since I started planning for my wedding. I guess it's just like how they say it, you would just know when you have found "the one".