Now, I'll point out that we had been dating for... ahem... some time before we got engaged (I don't remember the exact amount of time, but each of Mary's six older brothers seemed to have it down to the hour). But the engagement itself was very brief. We got engaged over the holidays, knew we wanted a spring wedding, and didn't want to wait a year and a half, so we dove in.
Anyhow, there's a real benefit to a brief engagement - especially from a dude's point of view - in that there's not a lot of time to oscillate over decisions. Music, flowers, menu, readings - we looked around, listened for advice, chose our favorite, and moved on. Sometimes it was unnerving. And when it was, we tried to keep in mind that, in the end, what we were hoping for wasn't a great wedding, but a great marriage.
This is a really nice first-person account of Jon & Karen, a couple who celebrated their 33rd anniversary by watching the royal wedding last year.
Jon and I were quite busy on our wedding day: We had chosen to have the reception at our apartment party house (free); pick up the food and beverages at a Big Bear store ($315 for the food, $53 for soft drinks); and get three kegs of beer from a friend who worked as a deliveryman for a distributor ($110).The beer plan hit a snag when the friend used his only call from jail to let us know he couldn’t make the wedding but that the kegs would arrive as promised.
