Getting engaged has been a bit like taking a crash course in etiquette. There is so etiquette tied up in announcing the engagement and planning a wedding that I'm a little worried I'll end up doing the wrong thing. Well maybe not, since it's my wedding and I'm pretty good at not caring too much about what other people think. But the things we've had to deal with so far have been interesting.
The first faux pax emerged when we began calling people up to tell them of our engagement. Everyone offered there congratulations, but one of my aunts quickly corrected herself. See, you're only supposed to congratulate the groom. The bride receives your best wishes. I can only imagine that this is a holdover from the days when girls where sold into marriage. It seems equivalent to saying "well, I hope you find yourself with a decent man, but there's no guarantee." Since I've already lived with Kevin for three years, I think I have a pretty good sense of what to expect.
For the most part people don't seem to know or care about this distinction. But there have been a handful of people ready to remind us about the proper way to react to news of an engagement. I certainly understand and appreciate the sentiment, but I find myself slightly offended whenever someone makes a point of offering me their best wishes instead of congratulations. Especially because these people usually need to start a discussion about etiquette.
Our other big etiquette dilemma revolved around the engagement party. Our college friends threw us a fantastic one in California the day after we got engaged. It was a ton of fun and very low-key. Then we got home and our local friends began asking about an engagement party.
On one level, this flies in the face of Miss Manner's advice to never throw a party for yourself because it tends to look like a gift grab. If someone else throws a party on your behalf, you should be gracious and go along with everything. But you should never expect one.
Then again, this is the modern era, and we had already planned to invite everyone over for a Memorial Day BBQ anyway. So that naturally evolved into the engagement party. Then we had to deal with the guest list. We're planning a fairly small wedding with a lot of out of town guests. This means that there were people who had already been invited to the BBQ that we weren't necessarily planning on inviting to the wedding. Which is not something you're supposed to do. An invitation to the engagement party tends to imply an invitation to the wedding, since the wedding is usually the bigger event.
In the end everything worked out. We kept the BBQ strictly a BBQ, and Kevin's mom provided some sparkling wine for everyone to toast with after we ate. But trying to untangle the web of what we're expected to do is already stressing me out a bit.
I know that in the end it won't really matter. We'll invite the people we want to celebrate with. Everything will be chill and fun, because Kevin and I are both fairly low-maintenance. As long as the day ends with us married, nothing else really matters. Everything else will just be something to laugh about in the future.
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