The Kind of Facebook Ads You Get When You List Your Relationship Status as "Engaged"
This popped up in the advertisement section of my Facebook account tonight:
How To Be A Groom
When you hear the two words “wedding planning,” you want to vomit. We get it. Check out ThePlunge.com. Written by men, for men.
I’ll admit, I haven’t always been the most helpful wedding-planning partner, and I’ve certainly stressed about the planning time-commitment and the potential expense from time to time — but I don’t think any of it has ever caused me to want to spew the contents of our last caterer-tasting out the wrong end. That men, in general, are less likely to be involved and/or interested in every detail of planning a modern wedding strikes me as an assumption that’s probably true. But it also strikes me that that’s a result of the way weddings are pitched as feminine affairs (check out the bridal section of a Barnes and Noble magazine rack — how many of the magazines are targeted at men?) and that many men — myself included, on occasion, unfortunately — simply decide to let the brunt of the planning fall on the woman for no reason other than that we can.
Just because this is true, however, doesn’t mean we should embrace it, which is what this ad seems to be doing. Part of that probably entails lazy dudes (again, like me) taking a more active role in wedding planning. It may also mean slowly making weddings and wedding-culture slightly more masculine in character, or (more likely) at least edge them a bit closer to gender neutrality. No, I don’t have a mechanism in mind to do this, much less any particular idea what such a wedding would look like. But buying into the idea that men, simply by virtue of being male, feel like tossing their cookies when the words “wedding planning” come up probably isn’t the way to do it.
Indeed, the whole concept seems odd to me. The advertised site, seems rather misguided — a sort of Maxim-light online lad-mag wedding special edition. Given that most engagements last roughly a year, give or take, there can’t be that many grooms really on the hunt for advice about bachelor party ethics. And since the starting assumption of the marketing for the site assumes that guys hate thinking about weddings, what’s the point? Good sales pitches don’t generally start by telling their audience that engaging* with their products might make them want to puke.
*Pun intended? You decide!
Other factors that cause women to do more wedding planning than men:
— In the eyes of many people, the wedding is a reflection on the bride, whereas the groom is assumed to have played a comparatively small roll, and is therefore less invested insofar as his reputation isn’t at stake. Obviously I’d never judge anyone based on the flowers at their wedding (I am somewhat unlikely to even notice them), but my assumption, right or wrong, is that the groom didn’t pick them out.
— Even if a particular woman isn’t really interested in planning her wedding, she’ll more than likely have a mother or maid of honor or whatever who is interested in helping her to plan her wedding, or at least asking her endless questions about her plan, and expressing shock if she professes to be ambivalent.
The average American wedding is IMHO circumstantial evidence that the matriarchy can be every bit as awful for women as the patriarchy.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Jul 30, 05:08 AM · #
would be interesting to do cross-cultural comparisons. in some societies weddings aren’t so female-centered because they’re a huge social occasion for the whole community, and the splendor of a wedding is a signal of clan-family wealth and generosity. i know this mostly from brown weddings, but i think it is a general issue….
— razib · Jul 30, 05:16 AM · #
Weddings are considered feminine because they are bride-centric, at least traditional weddings. For obvious historical reasons the bride is the star of the show. For example, she is the last to process and everyone stands when she enters, she throws the bouquet and it’s her garter that is thrown by the groom (plus removing the garter is really the point), and the father-daughter dance is a tearjerker where the mother-son dance is generally just considered sweet and probably could be skipped without notice, except of course by mom. Every iconic wedding moment centers around the bride. If it was my ass out in front I’d want to have creative control too.
If men are going to be a part the planning they will need to be a bigger part of the affair. The viral video of the dancing wedding procession is a good example. The groom made his own fun and spectacular entrance and the bride didn’t seem, at least to me, to steal the show. They were both important to the spectacle, if in different ways and at different times. I bet that wedding was a real collaboration because they got to think outside the box together.
— Mike in the Mountain West · Jul 30, 05:59 AM · #
Megan comes across as pretty laid-back and level headed about the wedding planning, but go ahead and try to be more pro-active about the planning and see how that works out for you.
Then imagine it with someone who’s been dreaming of fairy tale wedding for decades and hasn’t had those dreams tempered in any way. And, for good measure, throw in a mother-of-the-bride with her own thoughts about the wedding.
There’s a reason that grooms leave most of the planning up to the brides. By and large that’s how the brides (and their mothers) want it.
My wife’s a wedding photographer, so she sees a lot of this up close. I can recall many stories about weddings wherein the bride granted the groom a particular bit of the wedding that he got to plan (even if he clearly wanted to have more input), but none about brides who really wished their fiancées had been more involved.
— TW Andrews · Jul 30, 06:54 AM · #
The expenses of the wedding have been traditionally borne by the bride’s family, while the groom’s parents paid for the rehearsal dinner. That would tend to assign “creative control” to the bride.
That ad, of course, is just one more application of the hoary “Dagwood Strategy,” in which marketers portray men as too stupid and infantile to, say, take the right cough medicine. It gives men a condescending pat on the head, encouraging incompetence and indifference, while assigning the responsibility for shopping (and for thinking, really) to the lady of the house.
— Matt Frost · Jul 30, 12:48 PM · #
Planning a wedding, in my experience, is not too different than planning a military invasion. You just hope that your air supp – I mean, your flowers get there on time and on target.
— Klug · Jul 30, 05:30 PM · #