ahem. wrote:Now I'm curious what your ideal plan was going to be. Can you describe it? I promise not to judge.
Here's the part that's relevant to this soapbox:
The women are supposed to wear a uniform color (groom's family = coral, bride's family = yellow), but each person gets to choose her own dress. Here's the idea: hopefully, they will each choose something that they really like in that color, and they will be able to wear it again in the future. This is to eliminate the frustration of having ugly bridesmaid dresses that everyone hates. It also means they should match each other and look great in the pictures (we provided color swatches to prevent them from deviating too much from their assigned color). It also means the bride has one less decision to make, and a lot less shopping to do. They are happy and we are happy.
makes sense to me. weddings tend to bring out the crazy in people. i'm of the opinion that as long as the couple getting married isn't asking for something totally crazy, guests should do it, especially close friends and family. if the bride wants you to wear a certain color, and you already bought something else, tough! return it!
remember cheese, you have to look at these pictures for the rest. of. your. life. shouldn't they look the way you want? you don't have to yell at them or anything, just politely request they switch to the correct color. or it could be cute to have some on the bride's side in the yellow and some on grooms side in the coral because now you're one big family and you're all mixed together!
The dynamics of pulling off a wedding actually always fascinate me. It is such a tug and pull of what the bride and groom want and what the families want. And I have a morbid fascination with seeing the atrocities that people write to Dear Abby or Miss Manners about for weddings in the rest of the non-Mormon world. "I just lost my job, but the bride is making all of the bridesmaids wear three dresses for the three day affair that total over $1000, what do I do" and "I just got an announcement without an invitation to the actual weddding, but they specify that all gifts should be on their registry of cash donations to their honeymoon fund, with the lowest amount being $100" and "My friend is giving me the cold shoulder because I got engaged in between her engagement and her wedding and she says that I should have understood I had to wait to not steal her attention", etc. Makes me so glad Mormons usually have the common sense to focus on the marriage and not the wedding party. At least, not to the extent of spending an entire year planning and $50,000 on the event.
So, bigcheese, I like your plan- what exactly did they purchase instead of that?
I'm not trying to go against your wishes at all, at all, but… do you know how hard it is to find dresses nowadays? Especially in a specific color? I was a little surprised at you wanting your family to all find coral to wear (that's not a very common color), but then to require dresses instead of skirts on top of that? Yipes. I'm intimidated and I'm not even part of the pseudo-wedding party. I also hate shopping, so perhaps that's part of it, too.
