Behind the Curve
This post is filed under: Guest Blog Entries | Direct Link: Behind the Curve
By: Andrea Girolamo (guest blogger getting married on September 17th)
I think, if there were a bell curve of brides, I’d be an outlier, hanging out somewhere near the low margin of the page.
I know this, because I have visited TheKnot.com and I’ve realized that almost nothing there applies to me, or the vision I have of my wedding day.
Let’s back up for a second. Hi. My name is Andrea, I’m 29 years old and I’m a design magazine editor. I live on Long Island with my fiance Justin and our two emotionally needy cats, Bubs and Dee. Justin and I have been together for just about three years and we were the types that pretty much knew from the first date that this was it, whatever it means.
And that sounds typical enough, until you consider the fact that the first time I ever pictured what I wanted my wedding to look like was several weeks after the engagement. I wasn’t thinking about weddings when I was younger—I thought I was going to be a fancy book editor in New York City and live in a tall building overlooking Central Park. A man and a wedding didn’t factor into those fantasies.
After our engagement, at the top of a waterfall in the Shawangunk range outside of New Paltz, NY, I had to sit down and start thinking. The trouble is that I live kind of a full life: I have a brainpower-draining 9 to 5 career, I wait tables to pay off student loans on the weekends and I spend a lot of time volunteering for conservation organizations around Long Island in my free time. My friends are mostly living in Brooklyn these days, and I spend a lot of time traveling to see them. Finding five uninterrupted minutes to think is rough. But I started, and that’s when I heeded the advice of a dear friend who was married in December, 2009 on a largely DIY-budget: Hire a wedding planner, she had stressed. If you must cut back in other areas or push back the wedding to save for one, it will be worth it.
And so, I did. I hired Shannon Whitney, of Albany-based Wedding Planning Plus, and got ready to get down to work. There were a lot of decisions to make, and time was a-wastin’.