For the record

I sincerely hope this isn't going to surprise anyone. We are not going to get married at Disneyworld.

It seems like a truly awful idea, orders of magnitude worse than most of the tacky wedding-industry packages, because it's a place whose existence is devoted to being fake. What worse symbolism could there be with which to start a lifelong commitement?

So now I would like to introduce a couple of key terms that may clarify what little we have thought through about the wedding, by adding to Melinda's list of things we will not be having or trying to minimise our dealings with:

The Wedding-Industrial Complex

The vast conspiracy of services to convince couples that they can't be happy unless they spend a year stressing over every last detail of a complex, extravagant wedding that costs more than their education did (OK, so that comparison might be a tad over the top for Americans, but you see what I'm getting at).

Disney Wedding

Beyond literally meaning a wedding at Disneyworld, this is a general term for the kind of fantasy wedding that every girl is supposed to start planning when she is 5 years old, setting herself up for guaranteed disappointment when the bridesmaids' dresses aren't quite the right adorable shade of puce.

That's all for now. I'm looking forward to posting positive things about the kind of wedding we will have, but I feel like there are important issues we have to resolve first, like where we'll actually be living, and planning the move to that place. Until we have moved, wedding plans will have to proceed slowly, because planning our life together is far more urgent than planning one nice day.