My Wedding Is Going To Be A Big Effing Deal

The night he finally proposes, I’m going to call every single friend and every single family member. I am going to dance around the room to Taylor Swift’s “Mine” and “Love Story.” I’m going to put Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” my favorite song since I was in kindergarten, on repeat because I already know that this will be the song we dance to as our first dance as a married couple.

I’m going to open my laptop and open a new browser to search for wedding venues — think I want an outdoor ceremony, but only if it’s a spring or summer wedding. Maybe we could get away with an outdoor fall wedding if it’s not too cold, but that could be risky. But the ceremony will only last ten minutes, fifteen tops. I’ll open another browser for florists, another for caterers, yet another for bakers who can do a three-tier red velvet cake and cupcakes, for those who want to eat while not having to stop dancing. Also because I’m just generally obsessed with red velvet cupcakes. I’m almost serious when I say that, if instead of a ring, a man got down on one knee in front of me and began unwrapping a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting and asked me to marry him, my answer would still be yes.

Oh, and one more browser for DJs.

Basically all I need to do is hand him my iPod where he’ll find a wedding playlist I’ve been compiling for years. It has a lot of current hits as well as the essentials, The Foundations’ “Build Me Up Buttercup,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” No “Love Shack.” Maybe that’s sacrilege at a wedding, but oh well, my wedding! And absolutely no line dancing. This is my wedding, not my Bar Mitzvah.

When I call my brother, I’m going to confirm that he knows he’s my best man. I’m going to call him my “Man of Honor,” and he will not be amused but, too bad. It’s my wedding, after all. I’m going to let him know that I would not be disappointed if he were to order a male stripper for my bachelor party – and I am getting a bachelor party. Though it will most likely take place at Skate Estate or Chuck-E-Cheese or something; my brother knows I’m not one for bars or poker nights and that a kids’ skating rink or arcade would be more appropriate for me.

I’ll make sure that he knows I want a long toast at the reception. Not so long that it starts to bore people, but I want a lot of funny, embarrassing stories about me, and I want the last one to have a sentimental ending so it makes me and everybody else start to cry. None of this one-line-toast, “L’Chaim,” let’s-get-to-the-food-already shit. I’m getting the speech I deserve after putting up with his shit for the past twenty or thirty (but hopefully twenty)-something years. And for loving him for just as long yadda yadda yadda, because I’ve already started writing his toast, and it’s fucking good.

I’m going to start making my half of the guest list, foregoing my parents’ friends and coworkers who I haven’t spoken to in years, and who don’t even know my fiancé’s name. I’m going to call my parents and ask them to send me addresses from the address book for our family downstate and in California, because they will be making the trip for my wedding. If I was able to find love, then they are able to get on a plane and spend the week celebrating that.

My wedding will be a two-week-long celebration (used to be a month, but I can’t be greedy), but only my immediate family and friends will be forced to celebrate for the full two weeks. And while I’ve already got my parents on the phone, I’ll probably ask them to lend me a few (thousand) bucks to cover some of the deposits I’ll have to put down up front, and they’ll most likely agree because they know that my fiancé and I aren’t stock brokers, we’re not high-powered businessmen. We are a plain, somewhat boring, yet completely content couple with ordinary, relatively low-income jobs; a mirror image of the kind of life they lead, because I’ve always striven to find that kind of simplicity.

I’m going to open Microsoft Word and look for the file entitled “Wedding Vows to My Future Husband” that I wrote years prior, and make any modifications I deem necessary. But I think I envisioned my husband pretty accurately, so that shouldn’t be too many. I will call my husband my husband. I will not call him my partner; we are not cops about to bust a crack house together — though that is on my bucket list. We are not in third grade about to color a map of the United States together. We are lovers — who hold hands on walks, who look deep into each others’ eyes while playing footsies at restaurants with twinkly lights playing Michael Bublé ever so faintly, who smile at each other knowing what’s going to go down after we devour our eggplant parm and penne à la vodka and finally get home from said restaurant.

I’m going to call my family friend who has been like a mother to me since the day I was born and ask her to officiate our wedding, knowing that she was already ordained online years ago. Because she will shed a tear instead of chuckle when pronouncing us “husband and husband.” And the inflection in her voice will state it as a fact, instead of as some sort of irony. Because my wedding will be the antithesis of irony.

My wedding will not be cute; my wedding will be beautiful.

My friends and family will not feign joy as I say “I do.” They will genuinely rejoice in knowing that after years of my cynicism and legitimate belief and fear that I would never feel the amount of love I feel on this day, I was proven wrong, and by the most astonishingly-abnormal, fascinatingly-simple, perfectly-flawed man.

My wedding is going to be the looking glass into the Eighth Wonder of the World.

My wedding is going to be a big fucking deal.