As you may or may not be aware, two months ago Mistress Kay allowed me to upgrade her to Wife Kay, because she is a foolish, foolish woman who makes questionable life choices (thank the gods). In the days and weeks since then, I have had ample time to reflect upon the wedding process, the wedding industry, marriage, and our future. Also, Wife Kay showed me her boobies, and they were neat.

Here are my thoughts regarding the wedding process – it was a pain in the buns. Don’t get me wrong, I had an excellent time at our wedding. It was one of the best days I’ve ever had. Everything leading up to it however…was less so. This is not to say that I would like to change anything, it was a learning process after all, and part of learning what works is learning what doesn’t. It’s just a bit of a bummer that after learning all these useful lessons, now that the wedding is over, we’ll never actually get to use that knowledge. We already had the wedding. I don’t anticipate having another. I suppose if Wife Kay ever comes to her senses and realizes how far down she married, she might divorce me, and then maybe I can possibly get a job as the wedding coordinator for her next wedding, but barring that unlikely scenario…our wedding planning days are over.

Most people who complain about the wedding industry complain about the costs involved. I am one of those people. Here’s the thing. I am a man of relatively modest means. I would consider our wedding to be fairly expensive. Ultimately we spent between $35-40k for everything involved. I know to some, that number would seem exorbitantly high, and to a surprisingly large amount of others, it would seem fairly frugal. My complaint is not that we spent that much money. We did it right. We both have good stable jobs. Hell, we both worked second part-time evening jobs in retail to save extra money exclusively for the wedding. We already own a house. We have no children. We have no other pressing financial obligations that we needed to be saving all of our pennies for. So over the course of the year and a half leading up from our engagement to our wedding date, we were able to save all the money we needed to pay cash for our wedding expenses. Sure, maybe it would have been wiser to have kept all that money to invest in some Roth investment accounts or moderate risk index funds or something, but fuck it, right? We wanted to throw a huge party to celebrate our life together and create special memories with our closest friends and family, and we did just that. I have no complaints about the amount of money we spent, because it was our money to spend, and our choice to spend it. I just wish some of the money was spent differently. Because that’s the thing about the wedding industry. Everybody has an opinion about what is “necessary” for a wedding to be done “right”, and I frankly didn’t give a damn.

Here is what was important to me: Gathering all my friends and family together. Eating good food. Drinking good drinks. Dancing to good music. Having comfortable and safe accommodations. Marrying the woman I love. Taking our clothes off at the end of the night for some unsupervised and mutually agreeable slime time. For those things, I would gladly pay the bill ten times over. They are what mattered.

Here is what is important according to the wedding industry: The rings. The wedding website. The save the dates. The invitations. The bride’s dress. The Grooms tuxedo. The bridesmaids and groomsmen’s matching dresses and tuxedos. The ceremony decor. The reception decor. The center pieces. The guest welcome bags. The cake. Every little piece of flotsam and jetsam you’re supposed to purchase to make your special day “special”. I could have done with out every single one of those things, and still had exactly as much fun and still ended up a happily married man, and I have a sneaking suspicion nobody else would have missed them either.

So why did we get all of those things? Because the wedding industry is insidious and it begins digging its dirty little claws into women from when they’re little baby girls, and it’s hard to walk away from all of those preconceived expectations. All of that pressure and all of that rhetoric about what is necessary and normal and traditional was targeted squarely at Mistress Kay from when she was a silly little Child Kay, so once we embarked on this wedding journey together, she had a hard time letting go of the little details that I was apathetic about or even overtly against, and in the interest of protecting myself from a potential bridezilla in the making, I just rolled over like a Vichy Frenchman in the spring of 1940 and opened my checkbook at the first hint of tears. Oh yeah, and that’s another complaint I have about the wedding industry. Whenever we went out together to meet vendors and make our purchases, nearly all of them treated Mistress Kay like she was some sort of Empress Kay, and treated me like I was nothing more than a bipedal ATM, if they acknowledged me at all. It left a real sour taste in my mouth.

Now that the wedding is over and done with, and we’ve had some time to rest and recuperate, we’ve begun dealing with the next inevitable stage in a young couple’s married life together.

The “When are you having BABIES!?” stage.

FIRST OF ALL – That’s a really uncomfortable question to me because when it is asked, I’m actually hearing ARE YOU HAVING UNPROTECTED SEX!? TELL US MORE ABOUT THE SEX!

SECOND OF ALL – I don’t know when we’re having babies. Maybe in three years when Wife Kay’s student loans are paid off and she doesn’t have to work 60 hour weeks any more. Maybe never. Maybe before then if we mess up during our WILD BOUTS OF UNPROTECTED SEX YOU WERE SO CURIOUS ABOUT AUNT MARTHA.

My feelings on children are complex. We have reached an age where most of our peers have settled down, and for the first time in our lives, we’re really surrounded by babies. They’ve changed from being an abstract thing that happens accidentally to cigarette smokers and immigrants, and become a very concrete and real thing that happens to our friends and relatives ON PURPOSE. Wife Kay is very much feeling the fever, since my sister and three of our close friends all have adorable little babies that she can squish and cuddle and coo over while her biological impulses scream like a London air raid siren during the summer of 1940.

Me? I’m a guy. I don’t really have that same biological timeline screaming at me. I could conceivably still be cranking out kids into my seventies if I ever get rich enough to employ impressionable young secretaries and I subscribe to a Viagra delivery service. Admittedly, those kids would probably come out looking half melted like the monsters from the Hills Have Eyes, but still, it’s possible. What I’m saying is, I’m not feeling the baby fever. Not yet.

I fear that for all of adolescence and into young adulthood, children were the worst possible consequence of sex, beating out HIV and waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a missing kidney by a wide margin. HIV and date rape induced black market organ harvesting are both treatable conditions. A child is a forever consequence. Asking me to suddenly consider children to be the best possible consequence of sex instead of the worst is too monumental of a paradigm shift to easily undertake. I’m trying but…it’s a work in progress.

My concerns about children are that I like sleep, and money, and a clean house, and being physically fit, and occasional binge-drinking or recreational drug use. It is my understanding that children are inimical to sleep, and money, and cleanliness, and health and beauty, and casually self-destructive risky behavior.

Everybody who has children that I’ve asked have all said Oh, yeah, you definitely should have kids, they’re WONDERFUL, THEY’RE AMAZING, YOU’LL NEVER EXPERIENCE SUCH UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, IT’S THE MOST GREATEST BEST THING EVER IN THE HISTORY OF TIME, but I can’t help but notice that their voices all sound slightly hysterical, and their puffy bloodshot sleep-deprived eyes are crying out silently for an end to their unceasing nightmare, and the raggedy unwashed clothes they use to hide their doughy amorphous shameful parental bodies are all artfully speckled with puke and snot and feces, and they look more broken then Italian supply lines in the first North Africa campaign of winter 1940, so forgive me if I’m hesitant to take them at their word on the subject.

I also struggle with the ethical implications of having children. Our world is over-crowded and dying. There are already more human beings in existence than we can practically support while bound to our one much abused planet. We don’t NEED more children. So who am I to use up more precious resources growing my family? What is so special about my particular mix of genetics that it absolutely must go on? I’m a fairly dumb guy who’s not even cool. Why should my undoubtedly mediocre offspring receive the limited resources that could be better served going to a higher potential individual?

Then again, I never said I wasn’t a selfish man, and having a little dude or dudette to pal around with would be pretty cool. So who knows.

Que Sera, Sera, right?