What's it Like to be Engaged

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be engaged, wonder no more.

Tomorrow, I get married. These past few months have been incredibly challenging and amazing. In order for you to understand what our engagement/wedding planning was like, here's a list of things to do in order to re-live our experience:

• Excitedly go to Bed Bath & Beyond to start the wedding registry, but get pressured and followed by salespeople and end up picking things no one would ever actually need.
• Make a pretty wedding website and tell a story about your relationship that no one will probably read at all, but feel pride anyway.
• The guest list. Write it out. Rewrite the guest list. Cut all your former friends off the guest list. Cap it at 200. 
• Book a beautiful church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached and an amazing reception hall that costs far too much money, but its a deal because all of your other vendors' availability lines up, since it takes place on a fake and superstitious Friday the 13th.
• Examine an online planner that makes you feel like you have to do everything that everyone else has done even if you don't like flowers.
• Ignore the many opinions of your family members.
• Bask in the disapproving glances and silences of disappointed people who definitely would've done a better job at planning your wedding.
• Raise your expectations.
• Re-invite all the people you previously cut off the guest list and decide to do a big ol' frickin' wedding, with bouncy houses and performers and live music and debt because you have families that number more than all the sand on all the frickin' beaches.
• Realize you already booked a venue. Crush your dreams.
• Lower your expectations.
• Update the wedding registry.
• See other people's engagements and junk on Facebook.
• Compare yourself to their picturesque photos, then realize you're not wearing pants and feel better.
• Damn Pinterest.
• Update the wedding registry.
• Meet with the photographer. Forget your initial vision and dream for your wedding. Cry to yourself in your head and hide it behind free Starbucks tea.
• During your marriage counseling, awkwardly discuss sexual intercourse.
• Look for an officiant, contact several thousand, all of whom have previous "engagements," pretend to laugh at their unfortunate pun.
• Update the wedding registry.
• Count on your fiancee's world-traveling dad to plan out your honeymoon. Thank him a thousand times for the frequent flyer miles that pay for your trip to San Francisco, which is ALMOST Italy.
• Update the wedding registry.
• Cut your entire guest list again and start over with a maximum of 50; book an outdoor venue, changing the date and half of your vendors, including your other venue.
• Schedule your intimate 40 person ceremony on one day and keep the 200 person reception hall on the aforementioned superstitious date. Confuse everyone. 
• Update the wedding registry.
• Look at 600 wedding videos and realize they're all the same. 
• Discuss not having a videographer, even though you're both highly visual people and one of you is a photographer and the other one is a videographer so you obviously value it, but clearly not as much as other people who are wealthy and annoying.
• Fail at getting the stupid marriage license because you both have to be there and the stupid service center is only open untill 6 and your partner gets caught in stupid traffic because you both forgot to grab the marriage counseling discount thing and now you have to reschedule AGAIN or pay 150 frickin' dollars.
• Update the wedding registry
• Look through past notes you've written to your partner for inspiration for your vows, then realize your poetry consists of haikus, bad limericks, rip-offs of rap songs, and poorly drawn stick figures of Love Boats.
• Create the seating chart for the dinner while sitting at a beach next to a man smoking marijuana and a drunk guy drinking cheap beer who endlessly talks to you about "those new cell phones."
• Gripe about the overcommercialization of the wedding industry.
  
• Buy the most adorable decorations.
  
• Create your own invitations, because you definitely have an aesthetic eye.
• Struggle under your lover's critique of your hand-illustrated invitations.
• Bring your iPad to a bar and work on the invitations. Get distracted by the guy next to you who buys you a drink and talk with him for 4 hours about God and his experience touring with your favorite band.
• Purchase professional invitations
• Address invitations
• Buy more invitations, because you're throwing two expensive parties. 
• Address invitations
• Update the wedding registry. 
• Look back at the to-do list on the Internet. Freak the crap out. 
• Emotional breakdown behind the couch.
• Watch your beautiful woman dance in the living room to funk music.
• Re-evaluate how much you both actually want a videographer, forgive her for secretly booking one because its basically like commissioning artwork.
• Dance with your beautiful woman all throughout the apartment to all your favorite songs. Make your favorite meal together. Go for a bike ride together. Make out, a bunch of times.
• Fall more deeply in love with the woman who understands your pain and holds your hand and kisses you and re-commit to focusing solely on your connection and friendship no matter what happens.
• Plan the rest of the wedding.
• Bachelor/Bachelorette party with your favorite people. Feel more love and confidence than you have in years. Forget all fear. ​
• Get married.
• Update the wedding registry.