To All the Grooms Out There: It's Time to Step Up and Do Your Half of the Wedding Planning
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Well, I did it. I finally boiled over and broke down crying over my fiancé's lack of involvement in our wedding planning. To him, it probably seemed like my blow-up came out of nowhere: We were lying in bed after a pretty normal day. We should have been falling asleep. But the anger in my chest was too much to hold in anymore.
“I need you to start showing up for me with wedding planning right now,” I said, my voice cracking as I tried to use the script happy relationship guru Dr. John Gottman had given me in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. “I can’t do this by myself anymore,” I said. “It’s too much.”
My deeply loving and supportive fiancé responded exactly how I knew he would: He said he was sorry multiple times. He said he’d do better. He also reminded me that we’d had a busy couple of weeks, and this was true.
For the past year and a half, we’d been in charge of caregiving for my grandmother and had only been given a respite of about a month while an aunt took over her care. In that time, we’d been playing social catch-up — traveling to visit two of my best friends we hadn’t seen in over a year, spending a week with my parents.
“I get that,” I said. “But I’m not talking about the past few weeks. I’m talking about the last year and a half.”
Like my parents and grandparents, my partner and I didn’t have a dramatic or surprise engagement. We’d known we wanted to get married for years. It just made sense to us. After moving from Wilmington, North Carolina, the city where we fell in love, to a small town in Virginia to take care of my grandmother, we agreed to get married in her backyard.
My grandfather, a sculptor, had built their home for their family decades before. We called it The House on Windy Hill. Initially, we’d moved in with my grandmother as a part-time setup to help her recover after she broke her hip and back in a car accident. A few weeks later, the country shut down due to to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, approaching two years there, her home had gradually become ours, too.
Caregiving during COVID had challenged but deepened our relationship: My partner and I had less time by ourselves, which made Saturday date nights and moments alone all the more special. We were more tired, overworked and stressed out than ever before — but we made such a great team, and I was so grateful to him for taking on such a huge life change with me.
After our caregiving break, we’d chosen a new wedding date and started planning again. But beyond the occasional comment or suggestion, my partner gave me almost zero help or input unless I asked for it.
I had a “Wedding Planning” spreadsheet with seven sheets and counting for budgeting, the day-of schedule, planning to-dos, guest list, seating arrangements, vendors and more. I’d put countless hours into sorting out all the details in these spreadsheets, as well as via Pinterest and Google Docs. Thanks to my married sister and best friend, I already had an impressive framework to use: all the steps they’d taken, plotted out month by month. All the labor I’d put in, all that time. I felt like he hardly saw it.
And I still had so much to do. Because of COVID, I was also fighting to beat other brides to the punch — two years’ worth of weddings squeezed into one — to secure vendors for a wedding a year away. We should’ve had plenty of time. But I knew we didn’t.
From the start, the assumption was that I’d take the initiative. Every conversation we had about wedding planning was a conversation I started. Some of this came down to personality differences: I’d always been the more social one, and my partner is a highly private and introverted person. We joked that we were the tortoise and the hare: He slowed us down, granting me the cautiousness and mindfulness I was seemingly born without, while I pulled us forward, insisting it was indeed time for our next adventure. In a nod to our complementary but sometimes conflicting roles, I gave him his ring inside a miniature turtle figurine.
My partner made it clear that he wanted to be married, but a 50-person ceremony was a big lift for him. He agreed to it because he knew how much I wanted it. While he avoided dealing with wedding planning due to busyness at work and complications we had yet to figure out — like how to deal with estranged family members or their strongly differing religious beliefs and expectations — I obsessed over every detail.
Another piece of our problem could be traced back to the way we were raised. In our culture, we prime girls to fantasize about the dream wedding. Boys, on the other hand, are taught they have to be ready to provide for a family — a major stressor for my fiancé, even in our two-income partnership. Growing up in a conservative Southern suburbanite community, my self-worth was directly tied to finding a husband and pumping out kids someday. Talking to other young girls at summer Bible school, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” had to be followed by, “Get married and have kids.” Sure, you could also mention a potential career like nurse or teacher. But if you didn’t include that first part, you were an outcast, weird, or — worse — a feminist.
Fast forward to my late 20s, and I’d lucked into finding a rarity in my community and the world at large: a man who was, most definitely, a feminist. And he didn’t have to tell you about it. We were the ultra-progressive couple our friends said they admired. We evenly split almost everything: rent, bills, groceries. At the same time, we were aware that we had differing strengths to bring to the table. Our balance of chores, while traditionally gendered at times, was just about perfect. We were happy. We got along. As a survivor of domestic violence, I was proud to say my partner was, above all else, thoughtful and kind.
But wedding planning felt like an exception to the rule. I had to drag him into discussing even the most important details of the wedding like choosing a date, location and guest list. I tried to assign out tasks like picking out a wedding band, since live music was one of the few things he’d told me he wanted. But I knew these tasks wouldn’t get done unless I also gave him a deadline and followed up with him.
As I shouldered the vast majority of the work for a day that was supposed to be monumental for both of us, I started to feel like I was marrying myself. I knew that what came before and after — our lives together — was the most important thing. But shouldn’t he have cared a little? And even if he didn’t, shouldn’t he have stepped up and helped with all the logistical work even the simplest of ceremonies required? Research, phone calls, meetings. When I asked my partner to weigh in on design choices, he did have solid opinions to share. I just had to pull them out of him, which made me resent him for all the prep work I did. Hell, I didn’t care all that much about what our invitations or place cards looked like. I was down to cut out so many unnecessary wedding norms: excessive signage, decor, even save-the-date cards.
Still, what was left was a lot. By default, it all fell on me. And that night, lying in bed with my mind running over vendors, catering and rentals, resentment boiled over into anger. I realized I felt so terrible — so hurt — because I expected more of my partner. We’d allowed ourselves to slide into traditional (and, for women, exhausting) gender roles we’d done such a good job of avoiding up until then. I felt the closest I’d ever felt to the marvelous Mrs. Maisel before her comedy career, like a 1950s housewife. I hated that feeling.
While many heterosexual couples have gotten better at dividing many things — out-of-the-house work, childcare, household chores — the most invisible and cognitively-intensive labor still largely falls on women. Research by Allison Daminger, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University, finds women are still tasked with planning, tracking and following through with to-dos. In other words, exactly the items that made up the bulk of my wedding agenda.
Despite how well my partner and I were doing in our relationship, the planning deficit was one problem we had yet to solve. The key to tackling this insidious type of gender inequity is to talk about it, to get more explicit about all that women do, shedding light on the work that too often remains invisible to the men in our lives, as Dr. Daminger notes in an article in the New York Times.
“Wedding planning is a great place to start a healthy dialogue about the division of labor,” says Lori Epting, LCMHC, a licensed clinical mental health counselor specializing in relationships and couples therapy and author of From Chaos to Connection: A Marriage Counselor’s Candid Guide for the Modern Couple in Charlotte, North Carolina. Every couple is different, but when your vision of how you’ll divide up tasks is misaligned, it’s important to have a genuine and intimate conversation about what you want.
To better balance wedding planning, Epting advises starting the conversation like this: “I’m afraid I’ll be left to handle the majority of the planning. Can we brainstorm ways to ensure we’re both involved?” or “I’d like to do the planning as equal partners. Can we sit down tonight, make our list, and divide up tasks?” I had to be clear about my expectations and feelings, and let my partner know his contribution and opinions were respected and valued by avoiding petty criticisms of, say, the color tux he wanted to wear or his taste in place settings. As I’ve learned, this approach can help prevent conflict in the future and encourage my partner to take initiative.
The morning after our late-night talk, I sat down in my office to meditate for a long time. Many of my thoughts brought to mind the dream of our wedding as my fiancé and I had envisioned it together thus far during date night conversations: walking down the aisle to my favorite song in my grandmother’s backyard, reading the poem by the poet we daydreamed about naming our future son after, eating pierogi and jerk chicken and other foods we fell in love making for each other so many years ago, sharing peppered cupcakes special-ordered all the way from the coastal town where we first met.
I knew we’d be okay, that our relationship was so much more than a wedding. But I still felt angry, and I wanted to let myself be angry, then slowly let the resentment leave my body.
I told him I had something to show him, and he opened up a new tab on his laptop screen. I pulled up a catering menu and asked him to let me know what he wanted — his ideal menu — by 1 p.m. Then, we’d put our picks together and decide on the best option. Then, I’d send our answers to the caterer to get a quote and schedule a tasting. I’d feel better soon, I thought, when we had the big stuff nailed down: food, drinks, rentals, an officiant. But I realized I was still in manager mode, so I took it a step further.
I pulled up my spreadsheet and emailed it to him. We agreed to more evenly split tasks that weekend by color-coding them and to share our progress on date nights. Figuring out whether or not we’d have a wedding band, determining if we needed a liquor license and arranging outdoor decor, for example, would all be up to him with no nagging from me.
It took a lot of faith and self-control to let go and trust my fiancé to do his part without hovering over him. If you still worry about your partner dragging his feet, it’s important to reject the impulse to micromanage — which tends to only encourage more feet-dragging, Epting says. Instead, be clear about why this is important to you, ask him to keep up communication, and ward off anxiety by reminding yourself of the many times he’s shown up for you before.
For me, it was useful to remember that my partner helped me and surprised me all the time. He’d taken on more dog care when I got overwhelmed with caring for my grandmother. He installed a security system all around her house when crime went up in her neighborhood, and frequently made homemade bread, butter and desserts on top of his half of weekly dinners. He did so much for us.
At 1 p.m., I had a work call. I didn’t want to bother my partner. I didn’t want to have to ask him (again) to help. So I waited. Seventeen minutes later — not that I was counting! — he texted me a screenshot of the menu and a large block of text explaining his preferences. We’d picked the same thing for catering: the German or Caribbean special, since we had a personal connection to both of them, but self-bartending so we could highlight local wineries and apple cider from our favorite shop down the street.
I took a deep breath. Finally, it looked like we were on the same page.
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