Letter to a Bride-To-Be

Do not screw it up.

Dear Bride-to-Be,

So you got engaged, and now you're planning your wedding! How exciting!

But before you get carried away and turn into some kind of crazy "Bridezilla," let's make sure you have this whole wedding thing in perspective, OK? It's important to remember, as you make your plans, that life is long, and that your wedding is only one among many events that you will experience, and also that it will be the most important thing that has ever happened to anybody anywhere in the history of the world. Everything after your wedding will be a letdown. So not to put any pressure on you, but: It has to be perfect. Not "good." Not "nice." Perfect. You want your wedding to be so amazing that all the other brides-to-be, realizing that they cannot compete with you, will call off their engagements and become nuns. Even if they're Jewish. That's how perfect your wedding has to be.

Sound like fun? Then let's get started!

In planning a wedding, the most important factor — more important than the caterer, or the florist, or which specific person you are getting married to — is the wedding location. You do NOT want to get married in your home town. That's boring! You want to get married someplace romantic. What do I mean by "romantic?" I mean "hard to get to." You want to have a destination wedding, which is a wedding that takes place where nobody involved actually lives.

So for example if you're from Denver, and most of your friends and relatives live in Denver, and Denver has plenty of nice affordable wedding venues, you cannot get married in Denver. You need to have your wedding in, at minimum, Seattle, although Thailand would be even more romantic. Whereas if you and most of your friends and relatives live in Seattle, either Denver or Thailand would be acceptably romantic, but Seattle would not. The important thing is that everybody involved in the wedding has to travel a long distance and spend at least three days in a hotel so they can attend a ceremony with a bunch of their neighbors from back home.

Is this hugely inconvenient? Yes. But on the other hand, it's expensive. That's why it's romantic, according to the following formula, which was developed by research scientists funded by the U.S. Wedding Industry:

Romance = Inconvenience x Expense

Using this formula we can mathematically determine that the most romantic person on the planet is Jeffrey Bezos, the megabillionaire who owns Amazon, The Washington Post and numerous space rockets, but is still bald. In a couple of weeks Jeffrey is getting married to his fiancée, The Future Mrs. Jeffrey Bezos, in Venice, Italy, a spectacularly inconvenient city that is slowly sinking into the Adriatic Sea under the weight of a huge throbbing mass of gelato-bloated tourists. According to published reports, the Bezos wedding could cost more than $20 million, and the guest list includes Oprah Winfrey, Katy Perry, Eva Longoria and — this is a direct quote from The New York Times — "some of the Kardashians."

As a bride-to-be, you should aspire to achieve this degree of romance in your own wedding, although as a non-billionaire you may be limited, because of budgetary constraints, to just one Kardashian.

Which brings us to the question of money. How much should you spend on your wedding? The answer, according to the American Association of Professional Wedding Planners, is: "way more money than you actually have." Your role model here is Heath Edward Bumpous of Crockett, Texas. (I am not making this person up.) On October 4, 2019, the day before he was to be married, Heath Edward Bumpous robbed a bank in Groveton, Texas, of $6,000. A short while later he surrendered to the authorities after his fiancée, who recognized him from surveillance video images posted on Facebook, talked him into turning himself in. In the words of Sheriff Woody Wallace: "He basically stated that he was getting married tomorrow so he didn’t have enough money for a wedding ring that he wanted to buy and he needed to pay for the wedding venue."

Am I suggesting that you should rob a bank to pay for your wedding? Of course not! Bank robbery is not lucrative enough wrong. I'm just saying you're going to need a lot of money, as well as a backup fiancé, in case for whatever reason your main fiancé is in jail.

And that's only one of the many, many wedding details that you, as a bride-to-be, need to attend to. For example: Are you going to have a Garter Toss? If so, which specific garter will you use? There are literally thousands of bridal garters for sale, and they can cost hundreds of dollars, even more if you decide to have one custom-made, which is of course the most romantic option — you may be certain that no off-the-rack garter will sully the leg of the Future Mrs. Jeffrey Bezos — and which also may be necessary to guarantee that your garter matches the Color Palette of your wedding. (You know you have to decide on a Color Palette, right? RIGHT?) You also need to decide if the band at your reception (this is assuming you decide to have a band) will play the same song when the groom is putting the garter on as when he is taking the garter off, or two different songs.

These are just some of the decisions that you, the bride-to-be, will need to make in regard to the Garter Toss, which is only one small element of your wedding, which I hope you're beginning to understand is a massive undertaking, comparable in scale to the Manhattan Project, but more complex, because the Manhattan Project did not require a flower girl.

And remember: If you mess up on one single detail — for example, if, God forbid, the ribbons on your guest favors clash with your Color Palette — YOUR ENTIRE WEDDING WILL BE RUINED. I apologize for shouting, but some things are too important for lower-case letters.

My point, Ms. Bride-to-Be, is that this is serious. This is not some festive occasion you're planning: This is your wedding. And there's no time to waste. Some of your competing brides-to-be have been planning their weddings for years. You need to get to work NOW.

And remember: Have fun!

Speaking of fun, it's time now for you highly entertaining paying subscribers to vote in the scientific poll and express yourselves in the comments.