Listen to the lyrics, please

Okay, so I’m sure that some of the lyrics aren’t 100% spot on in the songs we’ve previously pointed out for playing at your wedding, but there are always going to be songs that you definitely shouldn’t be dancing to for your first dance as the new couple, IMHO. Let’s regroup on a few of those. And yes, I’ll be writing another post like this in the future, and we’re more than happy to take your tips, if you’ve got ‘em.

Over at Bridalwave.tv, they’ve brought up two Sarah McLachlan songs, both of which are great songs as far as songs go, but I can’t say that “I Love You” is a solid suggestion, considering how the song “turns out” towards the end. They’re spot on about “Angel” on the same record, but let’s consider the whole song when putting these dances together, no?

Howabout this classy, super popular song that we all can probably recite the lyrics to at karaoke, but probably haven’t actually listened to: Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” made monstrously famous by the film Titanic.

• MTV
• Music Videos
• MTV Shows
• Entertainment News

That’s not to say the song doesn’t mean what we think it does, but it’s not really “about” starting off a life together. It’s kind of dedicated towards two people who’ve been separated, only to be back again “one day.” Check it out: “Love was when I loved you, One true time I hold to, In my life we’ll always go on.” Again, beautiful song, as songs go, but not the best choice for your first dance.

Going WAY back to the summer of 2006, the ever-awesome Stereogum offers up a post where people have stacked up poor song choices at weddings they’ve been to (or been in, no doubt - “My friend chose this one, really!”). Some highlights (and really, scroll all the way through) are the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” or an absolutely random choice with “One” by U2 - even The Edge says that “it’s not that kind of song.” Now if only commenter Jim was serious when he writes that he’d gone with NWA’s “I Ain’t The 1″ which Ice Cube sums it all up in the closing with “I don’t see no rings on this finger.”

While we’re having fun, we’d be remiss if not to point out that Ten Car Train’s got a great list of songs that you probably just shouldn’t be playing at your wedding, unless you’re typically that humorous. Not that they’re inappropriate for first / last / parent / whatever dances, but they’re ones that if you were to play them randomly throughout, without being completely tongue in cheek (most people aren’t, sorry), then you’ll leave a few guests confused. That said, I can certainly appreciate the use of a totally inappropriate song as your intro, just because it’ll be a good kicker, but playing Luda’s “Area Codes” in the middle of a dance-happy segment probably isn’t in your best interests, as good a song as it is. My personal fave of that bunch is Pearl Jam’s “Betterman,” which isn’t exactly about relationships where a lot of positive reinforcement is going on.

[ed: it should be noted that, sometime soon, we'll have a batch of Grand Entrance songs that you should *absolutely* use because they'll a) make a lot of your guests cringe inside, but dig it or b) make an absolutely heart-thumping moment become just a bit more awesome. So don't get all snippy if it seems like a contradiction to this post]

Follow tradition or start your own?

Recently, my bride-to-be and I were talking about the various anniversary gifts that people typically buy for one another after they’re married - you know, paper for the first year, cotton the second, and so on - and we both kind of agreed that we like the “traditional” gifts rather than the “modern ones. That’s not to say that being “old-fashioned” is what it’s all about, but some part of me thinks the traditional options are much more classic and meaningful, rather than some of the more materialistic items from today. I’m sure that ticks off a retailer or two, but even so, you can be “modern” and still do paper, no? Someone I was speaking with a few days ago shared that she and her guy had bought a new leather couch for their third anniversary - that’s pretty awesome.

Tonight, I caught this item from the Community Press & Recorder, where Betty Kamuf goes through where a lot of today’s wedding traditions came from. She has one detail I wasn’t familiar with - that guests, traditionally, were not served cake at the reception - which is something that I really enjoyed that some good friends did at their awesome wedding last fall. They went the extra step to take down the flowers from the chuppah and give a bouquet to all the women in attendance, and hand a takeout container like you might get with chinese food for a piece of cake to everyone. Definitely classy and fun, all at the same time. Also, rice, grain, or bird seed were tossed at the couple on the way out as “a symbol of fertility.” Huh.

In any case, it’s gotten me thinking - what kind of new traditions do we want to start, or which do we want to find elsewhere? We’ll be playing golf with the family the day before - something her brothers have all done on their wedding weekends - but we haven’t ironed out all the other details. It’s kind of funny to think that you have this as one of the two or three opportunities to leave a “mark” on your family & friends, but if there was ever an opportunity to do so, this is it.

What have others done as “traditions,” either old or new, at theirs wedding or thereabouts?

Would you ever go on The Bachelor?

While ABC’s “The Bachelor” isn’t one of the shows I’m typically DVRing, it’s something I at least try and stay current with from season to season, if only for its relevance to reality television (which I have a love-hate relationship with). With this week’s finale featuring Matt Grant choosing Lorenzo Lamas’ daughter, Shayne, to propose to, I thought I’d check in and see if any of you soon-to-be grooms (or anyone else reading Groomify) if you’d ever participate in something like this show?

Back in the fall of 2006, I received a request through LinkedIn from the casting folks behind the show asking if I’d be interested in taking part in whatever interview process went along with “The Bachelor,” which I turned down. Of course, that was after my girlfriend at the time (now fiancee) said “Hey, that’s a pretty cool opportunity! Wait a minute…” That said, if you had received a request through LinkedIn or elsewhere to be interviewed as a bachelor or bachelorette, would you do it?

Perfect doesn’t necessarily mean expensive, does it?

Those of you in the groomspace who haven’t started looking into finances when it comes to “the big day” have probably heard all the hubbub about what costs what, how long in advance you have to do this, and so on, already. Those of you who’ve been working on planning already are dead-on familiar with how much some things cost and the timing surrounding vendors and whatnot, and will hopefully nod your head at what I’m about to get into here.

Just because you and your spouse-to-be want to have a “perfect” or “awesome” or “amazing” wedding doesn’t mean you HAVE to spend upwards of $30,000, it just means on average that’s what they’re going for these days. Keep in mind there’s wanting to spend big bucks on things and then there’s having to do so. Sure, having a huge family on both sides of the aisle might require a huge reception hall and amount of food. Maybe a family tradition is that the to-be-betrothed pays for the travel for some part of one side or another or the wedding party’s formalwear. But that doesn’t mean that you’re beholden to spending a certain amount just because “everyone else is.” This is probably a spot where your mom was right in saying “if they jumped off a bridge, would you do it?”

Recently, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried a guest column by Anthony B. Robinson about the pricetags on today’s weddings and how they came to be. I won’t get into the religion vs. big business discussion, as Robinson does a good job of explaining that, but I will say that people definitely fail to keep in mind that this is a celebration of their marriage, not a celebration of what other people want to think about their marriage - does that make sense?

Yesterday, my fiancee and I were driving in the area where we booked our reception, and I was asking about why the larger, more expensive banquet facility just down the road was booked much further out than the perfectly awesome (and yes, I’m biased) place that we booked ours at. It should be noted that the place we’ll be having our reception is a pretty well-to-do restaurant, overlooking both a river and the Atlantic Ocean, with fantastic food and great service. It doesn’t pack in hold quite as many people for a reception or other event, but the food is largely exactly the same food you’d be able to order off the lunch and dinner menu in the restaurant itself, and the quality is exactly the same. To boot, it’s anywhere from $20-$50 / person less than the hall was, for similar meal options. Why is that?

Did we make our choice based on the pricing? It certainly factored in, but all in all I think we liked the restaurant choice better because it fit our interests and the vibe we wanted to share with our guests. Could we have just as easily gone with the banquet hall, and had a fantastic wedding? Absolutely. The trick here is that we went with what we thought was a good idea, factored in cost and took the monies we would have spent on food & drink at this place and are able to parlay it into something else we mightn’t have been able to offer if we had gone with the other choice.

Think of it like debt reduction, except your “debt” in this case is the ballpark area you want to be for your overall spending. A wise person who helped me with a plan to get me out of the debt hole I racked up while in college showed me how making x in payments per month to y debts would then be x in payments to y-1 once one was paid off, and so on. What am I saying? I’m staying that you should truly try and stay on a budget, whatever that number is. If you think that your budget is well under what “averages” are in your area, then taking some of those dollars and putting them towards a wedding planner, even if only for budgetary and guideline assistance in the interest of keeping you on track might be a wise decision. We’ll be able to have our wedding - at least based on where our current budget sits given employment, debt, and other concerns - at a few thousand dollars under the average for our state, which frankly I’m thrilled about.

This isn’t at all to say that you won’t get into a scrum about who has to cut how many people from the guest list, or +1s, or the transportation for the wedding party, or the honeymoon. The trick is figuring out what you’re comfortable with beforehand, and what you actually want vs. what someone at a bridal event (it should be noted that many are called “bridal” events, by the way) is trying to sell you. If someone’s parents are requiring a certain thing or a certain guest list or something else, then it’s not unreasonable, especially if the wedding isn’t being funded by that party, to ask for some middle ground or assistance elsewhere. As a for instance, we’ll be having a significant number of people coming in from halfway across the country, which is awesome, and we’d really like to make sure they’re not bored out of their minds for a few days when not at the wedding, and we’ve planned a dinner with most of that group for the night before our wedding. How are we fitting it in? Well, it’s going to be an outdoor (no rain!) event at my mom & stepfather’s house that we’ll either cater ourselves or just hook up with all the grills in the neighbors’ yards, and be done with it. Instead of shelling out thousands more dollars to get a hall for the night and formal catering or something like that, we’re doing some of it ourselves and people were more than happy to go along with it for the sake of having a great event.

The point is, don’t buy into every little thing you see just because you can, only to groan about the amount of money on your credit card afterwards. Pick a priority or two. If the bride wants to have a killer dress that’s out of the original budget - go for it, just adapt elsewhere. If the groom wants to buy his wedding party some amazing sports tickets as a “thank you” and it’s beyond the original budget, then that’s great too - but find a spot to make that work, and do things such as this to make the wedding yours, not the wedding that someone else told you that you were supposed to have.

[photo credit: Gracey Stinson]

More on name changing

Our last post about brides changing their names after marriage is probably one that we could talk about until the cows come home, and I thought it worthy to bring the discussion up again today after reading this post from Feministe regarding the flipside of that. By now, most of us should know that it’s not totally out of the realm of reality for a guy to change his name to that of the person he’s marrying, though it’s clearly not that “common” as other changes might be.

That said, though, is it something that’s done for creativity reasons, one not liking their name, problems with parents, or what? I’d *love* to hear from some men who’ve changed their names upon marriage, as I don’t know anyone personally, though do have a colleague who has a friend who’s done so. For those of you who are reading this, would you consider making a name change, do you dig your future spouse-to-be’s last name more than your own, or are you coming up with a third option, maybe “hybridizing” - as some of the Feministe commenters suggest - or making up a whole new one?

What you have to look forward to

Guys - and I’m certainly guilty of this - who leave their things, hell, everything, all over the place, have apparently met their match(es) in the contributors behind My Husband’s Crap, it would seem. I, for one, did get a kick out of the header, which states that the blog’s images “document clutter and unfinished chores along with dates in an effort to prove that she is right and he is wrong.”

That about sums it up, huh.

Dirty laundry just got a new location for outing

Okay, I’m not the first person to be discussing Tricia Walsh Smith’s video trashing her husband, et al, especially after the thing’s been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube. I’m certainly not going to be the last one, but some part of me feels like it’s an absolute necessity to address here at Groomify.

First off, I’ve gotta say that this is most certainly not going to be the last time that this kind of thing is done on YouTube, unless, of course, it ends up being fiscally detrimental to Mrs. Walsh Smith. It’s like anything else, once someone comes up with a slick idea, people continue to use it. Just wait, there’ll be a name for this manner of “outing” your dirty laundry via video online, give it a few days.

That said, I’m so amazed that this is actually still up on YouTube and isn’t actually part of an episode of ABC’s Boston Legal or something that it’s not even funny anymore. Those of us who work in the Web world have discussed what will happen with a lot of tools and trends once they actually make it to the “masses,” and by masses I don’t mean the few hundred thousand people who make spending entirely too much time in the world of Web 2.0 (and I don’t mean periodically reading blogs and such, but “industry”-folk) - and here, I think, is a good example. Video’s easy to make, and has been. YouTube is easy to use, and everyone’s got access to signing up for it. Cut up some bits of video, add some bumpers to it, and voila, you’ve got a trend-starting furor moving on up faster than George Jefferson.

So, gents and ladies, what do we think of the Tricia Walsh Smith video concoction? Stupid idea or excellent way to get payback?

On last names and changing them

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Libby Stock comments [via Kristine Howard] on Thursday about changing one’s last name upon being married, and her thoughts on why this is still happening. I’ve gotta say - and call me progressive or whatever - I really don’t see the big deal these days about a woman not changing her name.

I’ve heard arguments about “the kids not having a name to go by” and “it’s confusing,” and even been one who has been called by the name of my fiancee when they knew her last name but not my own, and thought we were already married. All that said, there’s a pretty good shot, I think, that she won’t change her name after we get married, and wanna know what - I’m good with it. Frankly, she kind of has a cooler name than I do (though I win in the brevity contest), and while I’m probably not going to change mine anytime soon (though it’ll make a darn good pen name one day), and I can see how she might like to stick with the name she’s had for her whole life.

Whether it be culture that factors into the decision or something else, there are a million ways to spin this. And, as I am seeing more and more discussion about it online, it really looks like a lot of women wait until the last minute to make their decision for sure.

Funny story: when I was about seven years old or so, I found myself wondering how men and women got to have the last name that they did, not realizing that they didn’t just “make up a new one” when they got married, but that most chose to keep the man’s last name, and go with that. That being said, does it really matter to most of you guys what name your bride-to-be has on her license or passport?