I’ve long been a fan of autumn in general, and it so follows that I’ve long thought autumn would be a nice time of year to have a wedding. My mom reminded me of this when I first told her that the beau and I were looking at dates between the end of August and October of 2010. “I just can’t believe you’d consider getting married in August. You always said you wanted to get married in the fall!” she said.
Um, Mom. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but the end of August is getting preeeeeetty damn close to fall*.
Semantics aside, I was honestly way more stoked about the idea of having an October wedding than an August or September wedding. True confession: when the beau and I first started tossing around the idea of getting hitched, before we even got engaged, I played around with the calendar. A lot. JUST LOOKING. You know? You ever done that? No?? Guess it’s just me. Anyway, I had my eye on October 9, 2010, in particular. I liked the symmetry of it. Ten nine ten.
Fast forward some months. We’d just gotten engaged. We sent an email out to all our friends to announce this. One of our friends, who had already been engaged for some time, wrote us back and said, “Hell yeah, congrats! By the way, be sure to save our date. It’s 10/9/10!”
Insert sound of needle skidding off record here.
Now, I knew there was absolutely no reason to be upset about this. They had gotten engaged over half a year before we did, and besides, it’s not like they could have divined that we were going to get engaged and want the same date. Yet there was more to it than just some numbers on the calendar. The fact that we shared the same large core group of friends made things more complicated. I didn’t want to put an undue hardship on our guests by making them arrange time off of work, travel, hotels, gifts, etc., for two weddings in the same short span of time.
After much discussion, we figured that it wouldn’t be discourteous to our guests or our friends if we held our wedding at least three or four weeks apart from theirs. Trouble was, moving the wedding target date back a few weeks wasn’t going to work, and moving it up a few weeks was going to interfere with my job’s annual conference, which is always at the beginning of September. And I didn’t want to leave my coworkers hanging.
Yeah, California has autumn leaves too
I was beginning to think an autumn wedding wasn’t in our cards, period. I was beginning to think we’d have to plan it for summer 2010 or spring 2011. And that was making me upset. And I’m not the kind of person to be upset. The fact that it was wedding-related convoluted the situation. I don’t want to be one of those kind of people. That kind of “bride.” Not to mention that we’d only been engaged all of three days, and I was already having a moment. WTF?
It ended up working out, of course. I tentatively asked my boss about the scheduling, and she advised I focus more on getting married and we can sort out the conference issue as needed. The weight was lifted.
So October is out forever, but that’s life. We know now that we can aim to book a venue from the end-of-August through mid-September range, and that’s a good compromise. It’s almost-autumn. And that’s good enough for me.
I’m sure my mom will come to grips with it, too.
* yes, fall technically begins September 21, but sentimentally, it begins after Labor Day.
I just found you through Becca and am enjoying reading through the archives. I went through a similar date dilemma except for me it was my best friend is pregnant and wouldn’t be able to come if we chose our original date, you know, with being busy having a baby and all. I was upset for about 3 days. Then I got over myself.