Now that FrankJ has made his intention to marry SarahK incredibly public, his Ol’ Buddy Scott has some Frank Advice on the wedding:
- Set Your Wedding Date On A Holiday By resisting SarahK’s insistence on a springtime wedding ceremony performed during a non-descript date in June, you’ll strengthen your marriage by getting married on a recognized holiday such as May 30th, June 6th, or July 4th. Guys will never remember “I got married on April 29th” but can easily remember: “Hey, it’s July 3rd–I gotta go buy firecrackers and flowers for our wedding anniversary tomorrow.”
- Insist On A “Kid-Free” Wedding Ceremony All women think that their sister’s little boy and their best friend’s little girl would make the perfect ringbearer and flower girl for your wedding; and they’d all be wrong. Kids are supposed to be the outcome of a wedding and having small children running around the church, pulling expensive things off of tabletops, and crying for no apparent reason is not helpful on that very stressful day.
- Use The Generic Wedding Vows You Hear In Movies Nothing screws up a wedding more than having a bride and groom recite personalized wedding vows. She will add something you never agreed to do which starts uncomfortable legal arguments at the altar. You’re no better off because you will forget all of your customized vows when it comes your turn and ad-libbing ain’t your thing, Frank. Tell the preacher to give you the generic wedding vows heard in every movie since 1929 and you’ll be fine.
- Prepare Yourself For Protestant Wedding Guests Some of your wedding guests might not be Catholic; you can tell because the dirty Protestants won’t be the ones kneeling, crossing themselves, standing, ad infinitum during the overly-long ceremony. For this reason, I suggest you not bring firearms to the ceremony but (as the last tip shows) it doesn’t mean you have to have a gun-free wedding!
- Get Creative With The Catering When Sarah chooses the most overblown, seventeen-tiered wedding cake she can find at the baker, you should agree without hesitation. This tactic gives you overall strategic control over the catering (and most importantly) the groom’s cake. By giving SarahK her pretty-princess fantasy wedding cake, you can then get her to agree to a Smith & Wesson-shaped chocolate and peanut butter fudge groom’s cake to compliment your BBQ brisket and/or Pancho’s Mexican buffet spread at the reception.
I’m sure IMAO readers have other Frank Advice for the wedding… drop your suggestion in the Comments for the groom.
Uh… SarahK is Church of Christ, not Catholic, so Protestants will be very likely at the wedding (and probably the one wed’n us).
Get one of those chocolate fountains instead of a big cake (you can get a fake cake with a small real cake top for the ceremonial cutting and the pictures). My fiancee is so gung-ho about the idea that it’s frightening.
-M
PS: All happiness to you and your bride, of course.
Sarah’s COC? Yeah, it’s a sure thing you’re gonna have Protestants there…
Hey, out of curiosity how do COC churches do the Wedding March music when COC doesn’t allow musical instruments during their church services?
Does everybody hum?
Advise for wedding
There is a scientific formula that accurately describes wedding day expectations.
WS(St(3))= (SA+SI)-1
Wedding Size, multiplied by Stress of Wedding to the third power equals wedding night sexual ability plus the wedding night sexual interest to the power of negative one.
What does all this mean? In layman terms, the bigger the wedding the smaller the nookie of the wedding night…
Good luck Frank.
I’m extremely qualified as an expert at getting married, staying married is a different matter, but we aren’t going there. Insist that nobody sings at your wedding, it’ll hurt some feelings now, but it’ll save a lot of ears later. I’ve been assured the “what’s her name” has a beautiful singing voice 3 times, all three forgot to bring the alleged voice to the ceremony. Unless you enjoy the sound of a sack full of cats roasting over flames on a very important day of your life don’t do it. JUST SAY NO!
GAAAAAAAAAAAAKKKKKKK!
Getting married in Protestant church = BAD for baptised Catholics!
FJ, ya might want to make a formal act of leaving the Catholic Church. Otherwise they won’t recognize your marriage, which will cause complications when the U.S. becomes a Catholic theocracy and your sons want to inherit but can’t because they are, technically, and I use the term with love, bastards.
Get a chocolate fountain. that was a major hit at my cousins wedding, but the lack of alcohol, in my opinion, was not. they also had an ice sculpture punch bowl. that was neato.
So at a joint CoC / Papist wedding, I suppose you can tell the difference
Those toasting with grape juice and upturned noses will be the CoCers.
Those toasting with a mixture of champagne, burbon, and scotch will be the Catholics
Those toasting with campagne, burbon and sterno are the Irish Catholics
The guy making the same toast twice(with rhymes with POST) will be Frank.
Make sure that your Catholic guests are well aware of the start time. If they are 15 minutes late to a Catholic wedding (with Mass), no big deal. 15 minutes late to a Protestant wedding and you may meet the Bride and Groom on their way out of the chruch.
One word, Frank J.: comfort. I got married 75 ft above a river in TN on a hotter-than-hell June day. It only made sense to do it in black T-shirt & black jeans.
Tuxes are for wusses. Never have worn one, never will.
Prepare Yourself For Protestant Wedding Guests
I also noticed that protestants have the gall to bring GIFTS instead of much needed CASH. The nerve!
Though CoC is pretty conservative so they might follow the same trend, I have no idea.
Seriously, My mother’s family is Italian Catholic, the wedding dresses come with little purses to hold the envelopes. For Italians, gifts are very much not wanted in leiu of cash (which is what married couples really need anyway). And hey, if someone steals the bag, we breaka their keecaps!
That’s “kneecaps” not “keecaps”
In this case, smaller is better. The biggest, most lavish weddings I’ve ever been to resulted in the shortest marriages. K.I.S.S has a double meaning for weddings.
Chocolate fountains are great. I tried to drown myself in one once, but this was a full on Catholic wedding with an open bar. A word of advice … Is there anyway to have liqueur at this wedding … your catholic relatives will never forgive you.
Congratulations!!!
Time will fly, so I suggest a later date for your wedding, and it should be easy to remember: 12/7.
A friend of mine in college was going to use this date, but events (shall we say) led to an earlier date. Doesn’t mean the original plan wasn’t a good one, though.
As for firearms, if it’s going to be a shotgun wedding, I think you consider his & hers SPAS-12 (or the updated SPAS-15). They look cool, and you can use them to shoot at the beer cans your friends will tie to the back of your car.
BTW, congratulations & best wishes (as appropriate to each of you). I think it’s great.
My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
Once you’ve been married for a sufficiently long time, you’ll be following that advice, whether you remember it or not.
What, you didn’t know that the Wedding March actually has words? Sounds good too.
C’mon Scott. you know any groom cake for Frank has to be in the shape of a Colt 1911! Where’s yer head at Man! Congrats again Kids!
Go for somthing nice and traditional: full KISS makeup, ride down the aisle on dirtbikes, distribute firearms to guests to shoot in celebration at the “kiss the bride” moment, shot block and beer slip-and-slide at the reception
oh, and best pre-wedding prep: a pre-nup
just kidding
but not about the KISS makeup
There are CofC-Instrumental and CofC-NonInstrumental.
Frank,
The usual advice is for the Groom to just give in to the Bride, i.e. ‘Give her what she wants’. This is a bad idea since it makes you appear to not care as much about the wedding as she does. The more areas where you have strong the opinions the better, especially if they disagree with SarahK’s. Then you can give in to her demands, only after a protracted ‘discussion’ and she can be happy that you cared enough to want something and happy that she got her way! Also, you need to keep this strategy a secret from her for at least the next 25 years. Have fun with the planning.
Frank. Give Sarah everything she wants. 5 minutes after the wedding, you will realize everything belongs to her anyway.
Oh, and if you have the ring locked into a hotel safe, For God’s sake Don’t lose your key, else, you’ll be drunk and staring at a locksmith, who you called for an ’emergency ring release procedure’ at 2:00 am, praying to get sober and the ring back at 3:45 am cursing yourself that you should be sleeping cause you’re gonna look like hell and probably smell worse at 9:00 am the next morning. And while staring at the locksmith, he will stop working at frequent intervals and make faces like ‘gee, what’s wrong here’ just to keep you on your toes.
Elope, elope, elope! If she’s not into it, elope without her and it’s a fait accompli (French for something already done, therefore unchangeable. It’s also French for I surrender, but what isn’t.)
Make sure what ever your wedding cake looks like, it’s edible. I drove my wife nuts because while she (I won’t be obvious by suggesting that every bride is this way) had all kinds of “wants” for our wedding I only wanted two things: to get married (duh!) and to have a chocolate brownie wedding cake. I got everything I wanted, and people actually ate the cake. And it was a beautiful cake!
Jamie: We tried “formally” leaving The Church before our wedding. But guess what? We were told that “leaving” wouldn’t be recognized! Yup – once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Even if you don’t want to be.
Weddings done not in a Catholic Church and between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic have to be cleared with the Church, but they can still be recognized.
I am SOOO happy for you two! Warning: Your relatives /friends can have VERY strong feelings about how things should be at your wedding. Advice: Don’t let your relatives (including parents), friends, coworkers, church acquaintances, or blog family /readers influence your wedding plans with what they think it should be. This is YOUR day, you have it the way you want it, and your memories will be sweet. 🙂 From someone who gave in to everyone else on everything and ended up with their dream wedding, but not hers. Except I got to keep the groom. 🙂 That makes it perfect, and still is, 23 years later. 🙂
Like Frank said, she’s a Christian, so they can get married. It’s preferred that you have a marriage ceremony (not a Nuptial Mass…have to both be Catholic for that) in the Church, but you can get married in a protestant church and get the marriage convalidated. It’s not really all that big a deal. However, convalidation does have to be done before the marriage is recognized. Without it, you do run into the problem that Jamie mentioned.
One nice thing about a protestant wedding, besides the length, which someone else already mentioned… the singing tends to be several orders of magnitude better.
Jay the Lutheran
Get married on the 29th of April, it’s my birthday
Hey Frank J…good luck with the upcoming marriage.
Hmmmm…. do you have to wait until the marriage is convalidated before you connsumate it?
PIMF! “consumate”
Frank – No, no, no. I wasn’t referring to the actual marriage and the wedding, just the act of “leaving” the Catholic Church. It doesn’t matter why you’ve decided to leave, we were both told by our former priests that once we’ve been baptized, confirmed and all that, we’re theirs until death. Even if excommunicated, you’re still considered Catholic.
The wedding does not make the marriage. I have had it both ways – big wedding, small marriage – small wedding, wonderful marriage.
Elope. Keep it to yourselves, and don’t give out too many details. Make it special. Then send out elaborate marriage announcements to rake in the gifts!
Best wishes.
Oh, right, Frank. In fact, I recently attended one of those. But sometimes my butt is ahead of my brain. And also I wanted to refer to your sons as bastards in a very non-pejorative, technically accurate way. 🙂
On the other hand, Tracey, you CAN leave the Church according to a Catholic apologist I was reading the other day. (Jimmy Akin. It’s on his website.)
The other way you can tell Protestants are in the crowd is that they are the ones drinking the Martinelli’s during the toast, muttering “Dang papists!” under their breath.
My advice? Don’t do it.
If you must do it and can’t live in sin, then have a wedding that is for YOU, not for anyone else, just you and her. Don’t try and please your families and friends and guests, but just yourselves.
As for the marraige: Be good to each other. Always. Listen as well as you possibly can. Empathy and understanding are skills that require mastery and honing if a marraige is to survive and been rewarding. You must compromise and share and give more than you get.
A good friend of mine got married on April 15, 2000.
Smartest. Man. Ever.
“Hey, Friday’s tax day. Guess I better get some flowers!”
“Oh yeah? How long have you been married?”
“Let’s see, it’s 2005, so 5 years.”
Of course, if we ever wise up and go to a consumption tax instead of the income tax, he’s screwed…
As for you, Frank, you may want to consider June 6 of next year. Although targeting 6-6-6 as your wedding day probably won’t make either the Catholics or the CoCers very happy…
On point 1, I’m there 100%. My anniversary is April 1. For real.
Use the wedding ceremony from Joe vs. the Volcanoe, without actually jumping in at the end of course.