Wedding budget... and other things...

This wedding thing is overwhelming sometimes. Not because there's so much to do, but because of the pressure that surrounds it and the weird expectations. Not even for me, per se, although there are some on me, but in the world.

I peruse Pinterest's wedding section for ideas sometimes, and there are women in there who have their entire wedding planned out massively and you can kind of tell by their other boards that they're not even with man yet. They've got endless pins of dresses, flowers, arrangements, jewelry, future engagement rings and even undies to suck it all in under their future couture gown.

The most discouraging has to be when I look at these so-called budget bride websites. Holy crap is your "low budget" totally not congruent to mine.

So here you go, why not, the breakdown of our "low budget" wedding, so far:
(In Canadian dollars.)
Wedding rings (including customization of mine, molding materials, shipping (fedex) and taxes on this side of the border:
$1282
My dresses (2):
$400
Hair clip:
$115
Flowers (so far, for bouquets & boutonnieres):
$335
Cake topper:
$49
Décor (so far):
$48
Favors (not bought yet, but priced out):
$112
Venue:
0! YEY!

Other estimated costs (yet to be cemented):
Food:
$1000
Photographer:
$1500
Pants and a new tie for the groom:
$200
Wedding dress alterations (the waist is a little big):
(I have no idea how much that will cost, but it's booked, so we'll see.)
Stamps:
Let's go with $60 for this one and hopefully we'll group some together. :-/
Hair:
I figure I'll do the Natalie Portman haircut, so I can do that a couple days before and not worry on the day.)
Make up:
Gah. My one "I have no idea what to do about that," left...
Wedding party gifts:
No idea about this either, but I'm less stressed about it because prezzies are well within my comfort zone. :D

Things parents are paying for:
Rented plates & cutlery, etc - my dad.
Invite paper and printing - my dad (We kept costs way down here though. We're going with plain white thick paper. That's it. Let's say... $70 total? I don't know how much he's spending. He doesn't say. -.-)
Potential tent (bleh) - my guy's parents. We'll see how many RSVPs we get and decide whether or not we need a tent. With the tent come chairs and tables and stuff... and complications..... anyway.

Add that mess all up and add estimated notary fees (and don't include the rentals, potential tent, alterations, gifts and other things I'm forgetting) and you get:
$5911

EeeeeeEeeeEEeeEEeEEeeeee... Already $911 over budget- not even including the cutlery and stuff! Man!

A handy pie chart. It goes clockwise from smallest to largest (down the list).

It's really hard to blow a wad this huge on one day. And these so-called budget brides with their $20,000 budgets? How do you do that? I mean, even if we had the money, we wouldn't do it. The most frivolous and unnecessary thing we've bought for this wedding so far is my hair clip. Other than that, it was pretty standard and relatively cheap. Especially my dress. And I don't even have shoes on there either because I intend to be barefoot or wearing my vibrams under my dress.

Oh, and I think the cost of a barbecue is covered in there somewhere, but Mike's asleep so I can't ask him if it's in there for sure or not (he's the food section).

I still kind of want the earrings I posted a while back and I'm not getting a garter because I find that tradition creepy. What else? I'm still debating on whether or not to drop $100 on hydrangeas from Costco or not. We'll see. There will probably be added costs for decor, as I have to find a tiny hole punch and buy some wood and hooks to hang the origami butterflies.

We don't have a dj or anybody hired for music. There is no alcohol in the budget because I refuse to fund that stuff. There may be alcohol for a toast, but that's not coming out of my dog food money.

I guess that's it, really.

Man, it's so hard to stay cheap though. We've done our best, I guess. And we're happy with everything we've gotten so far, so that helps.

It is weird though, being among these women who have been planning these things for decades, long before they even knew what man they'd actually marry. I didn't have that kind of experience. Aside from joking about having a curling wedding with an ex who never loved me at all, weddings just were never on my radar. I'd to to weddings and know it wasn't for me, and yet, here I am, right in the middle of it. I mean, I'm even wearing my wedding ring still, as I write this.

The only other memory I have is from when I was tiny and would hide behind the sheer white living room curtains and walk outwards and let the curtain slide over me, pretending it was a veil. My most vivid memory of those moments was the intense smell of dust as the curtain slid over my face.

That's about it.

I never had a boyfriend in high school. I had some crushes, but they tended to end in me being humiliated, which was fine because I somehow adapted to being embarrassed to the point where it didn't even bother me anymore. A boy I could have dated, one of my best friends, told the world we were dating in high school, but never bothered to tell me. And then I got held hostage by the first guy I tried to get closer to in spite of my discomfort, but I escaped. I pursued snowboarding intensively and with that came its share of boys, but none of them were marriage-worthy. Not even close enough to get an idea in my head about it. I was on my own and I liked it that way so much that it never occurred to me to be any other way.

And yet, somehow, I found myself stuck in an six year abusive relationship and I followed that with a year and a half long abusive relationship. That one put it in my head that marriage was potentially a good thing, but his ending morality shattered any sort of optimism I had on the subject at that point. I think I was pretty well done. Terrible guy after terrible guy- how are you supposed to get any sort of inkling that one day, you will find a guy with whom exactly what they say happens- you just know? How are you supposed to know that that actually happens? And really, how are you supposed to plan for that?

My aunt once said she'd never date a man she couldn't see herself married to, but who are you supposed to date when you don't see yourself married at all, ever?

And then one fateful day in September, you finally meet the guy you agreed to meet in May and you follow through with your half-joking plan to lay out all your junk on the table and ask him if he's still in anyway, and somehow, he says yes. And he's been saying yes ever since, regardless of the giant mass of junk that has accumulated on that tiny wobbly table in the now defunct coffee shop where we once drank warm beverages together for the first time.

How do you plan for this?
How do you pinterest this?
And how do you do either years before you even know it exists?

I don't know, but the only thing I envy of them is how they got a bit of a head start with the planning and the coping... But even then, they don't even know what they're planning for. They don't know this.

Anyway.

All that matters in the end is that we have what we have, however we got here and whatever the future holds for us.