The Wedding Genie

This week those lovely boys at I am Staggered at campaigning for couples to get married where they like. It is a shame when you have a fabulous idea like getting married in an idyllic place that means a great deal to each of you, such as a beach, but legally you are restricted. There are ways around it, like getting married in a registry office first then hiring a wedding celebrant to marry you in your idyllic place. Check out what Staggered say and see if you want to join their campaign.

One of the things that often surprises readers and bloggers over at Staggered (it’s the UK’s leading men’s wedding website don’t you know) is that they can’t get married anywhere they would like. Yes, there’s some great venues and churches but there are strict and stupid restrictions that say where you can’t get married.

When the rules regarding ceremonies were changed in 1995 by The Marriages (Approved Premises) Regulations it meant an explosion in the number of intriguing and exciting places that were allowed to hold weddings. This was brilliant because it meant that couples could get one step closer to finding somewhere that truly reflected them to hold their most important celebration.

Unfortunately, in the UK outmoded and pointless legislation still exists that needlessly restricts where people can get married and badly damages British business.

Want to hear something seriously outdated?

- Weddings must take place between 8am and 6pm

- Wedding venues must have a roof

- Wedding venues must be moored to their foundations

What. The. Heck.

Now all of this might sound like a bit of silliness, but there’s actually a very serious, multi-million point to it all. Currently, 18% of British couples are choosing to marry abroad. Often the dream that is sold to these couples – and the one that they feel reflects them – is to marry on a beach. Maybe some of them would choose to marry in the UK if they could marry on a British beach – but you can’t marry on a beach here because it doesn’t have a fecking roof.

There is something seriously wrong going on here. In an era when the government are supposed to be supporting British business, they are allowing an entire industry to wither on the vine for the sake of not tweaking a few lines of antiquated regulations. We’ve looked at this from every angle and there’s no sensible reason why this shouldn’t be changed immediately. If you live in a coastal area and think your MP would like to bring more business to your constituency, get them to be a hero and raise this in Parliament – we demand to know – why can’t you have a beach wedding?

If you would like to register your views, please consider adding your virtual signature to The Any Campaign . For more information see http://www.theanycampaign.co.uk/ – they’re currently 300 signatures off their target of 1000…

Until next week, happy planning.

I think Staggered have a point with this blog, men do want to be more involved in their wedding planning. The Wedding Genie are going to address that in 2011, watch this space. In the meantime having a little piece of I am Staggered each week is a big help.

2011 – The Year of the Groom?

It turns out the final straw was the shoes. I was talking to a groom who rang quite out of the blue to rant at someone. We don’t get loads of calls at Staggered but if you’re canny you can find the telephone number on the site and we quite often have it on our emails and this one groom called Mark decided to call us.

Mark’s problem was shoes. He’d gone for a fitting for his wedding suit and the guy who was helping him get kitted-up had tutted about lending Mark some shoes. Naturally, this put Mark in a bad mood, “I knew trainers would look stupid with my suit but I just thought I could borrow a pair and when I asked he tutted. It was weird, it made me feel like I was being stupid.”

Now it could just be that Mark was unfortunate enough to come across a guy who was having a bad day. But it serves to illustrate how different the groom and the bride’s experiences of wedding planning can be. For a bride – getting her dress is an empowering, bonding and beautiful experience – for a groom getting the suit that he will wear on the most important day of his life he gets tutted at. Is that fair?

Clearly for legal reasons we couldn’t go with Mark’s initial request which was to write “***************** ARE *****” on the front page of Staggered but we agreed that it was time to do something about the situation facing the modern groom. Especially as this isn’t by any means an isolated incident.

We’re absolutely not saying that we want to cheat the bride of the wedding experience – we fully accept that it’s still the bride’s big day. What we think though is that a wedding is about celebrating the beginning of a partnership – and that begins with respecting both sides of the couple – the bride and the groom. If the wedding isn’t an inclusive and equal celebration then what does that say about the beginning of the important bit: the marriage?

Every month I am genuinely privileged to get to communicate with tens of thousands of men who are excited about their weddings, but many of them are reserved about communicating how they feel because they are made to feel that it’s somehow a bit weird that they’re excited. These men are committed, passionate, excited, emotional and engaged with their weddings and with their wives, they don’t approach weddings in the same way or get excited about the same things but it’s just as important to them as it is to the bride. Don’t take my word for it – go and read Dan’s blog and meet a modern groom for yourself. What they need is for people to accept that they are there and not try and work around them, tolerate them or worst of all dismiss them and their ideas.

On behalf of men like Mark and Dan we are asking the wedding industry as a whole to look at how they interact with grooms and appraise whether they could do more to engage with them. We’ve already had some great discussions with wedding fairs – many of whom are looking to increase their content for grooms in 2011 and that’s brilliant, we’ve also had word about some interesting new wedding-related TV programmes that don’t disgracefully redact the groom like programmes such as Living TV’s Four Weddings does.

Until next time happy planning.

Well would you believe it, those gorgeous Staggered boys who entertain the grooms on my web site (and me) are expanding! No not their waistline! but how about this? They are crossing the atlantic. USA be warned staggered is coming to you.  Good luck I say and have fun! Hop on over to check them out.

Just in case you are reading this and wondering why there is a wedding web site for men. The fact is that only 14% of weddings are paid for by the brides family, that means couples are footing the bill. I know my husband took much more interest in our wedding when he was the main contributor. Not only that modern men are happy to help. Only yesterday I ran a Bridal Workshop and one of the participants was a groom! He was keen to be involved and take a load of his gorgeous fiance. I will elaborate more during the week, for now it’s back to Andrew.

Andrew, the editor, told me a little more about his plans for world domination.

• Remind me what Staggered is again It’s the UK’s leading (and only, which is how we know we’re leading) men’s wedding website. Launched in 2009 it aims to help grooms, best men and fathers of the bride with weddings, from proposals to honeymoons.

• When are you launching and what is it? We’re launching a brother website to Staggered, called Staggered USA, which launches on 25/10/2010 with a party at The Volstead in NYC (if you’re in the US shout at brenda@iamstaggered.com for an invite). It can be found at www.iamstaggered.com/usa and it’s a website whose editorial mission can be summed up in three words: weddings, men, solved. We aim to help American grooms, best men and fathers of the bride to plan and enjoy proposals, bachelor parties, weddings and honeymoons. We also do aftercare with anniversary help and reminders.

• Who is running it? The very marvellous Brenda Della Casa is our US editor. She’s based in New York, she’s a relationship expert who has written for a trillion companies like Cosmopolitan and Glamour and she’s worked for Staggered from the beginning. She can be hollered at via brenda@iamstaggered.com. Brenda has assembled a team of experts including Peter Otero from Silver Birches who is taking a break from organising parties for Brad Pitt to help Staggered US readers plan amazing parties.

• Why are you launching in America? Because our outrageous egos demanded that we at least attempt global domination. That and the fact that since we launched approximately 20% of our traffic came from the States. The more we thought about it the less logical it seemed to disappoint 1 in 5 of our readers by not giving them advice and information relevant to their country. The more you look at it the more you see how different the two wedding markets are so it seemed obvious to launch an entirely separate, but linked, site.

• Will you change the way you go about it? There will be differences in how we run the site and it will be looked after by Americans obviously, but essentially it’s based on the same principle as the UK site – that we want to help men with weddings. There’s nearly 6,000 weddings per day in America (2,077,000 per annum if you want to know precisely) so there’s a lot of grooms, best men and fathers of the bride to help.

• Where next? We’re looking for Staggered partners in Australia, Canada and India for 2011.

• Can companies get involved? Absolutely. Speak to brenda@iamstaggered.com or andrew@iamstaggered.com and they’ll help. We’re especially looking for photographers who have shot stylish grooms in the states to get in touch.

Good luck from The Wedding Genie. I am sure it will be a resounding success, remember us when you control the world!

Until next time, happy planning.

It’s been a few weeks since we featured our lovely friends from I am Staggered. Andrew has sent us quite a fun blog. I know weddings are very emotional and can turn even the stoney hearted into emotional wrecks – but these grooms really push it! I have to admit though they did make me chuckle. Enjoy!

Men – we’re surprisingly complex beasts you know? You women look at us and just see the oil-stained hands, our knowledge of football trivia and the leering at women we do as we drive past them on the street but you completely overlook the fact that beneath these crunchy, sexist outer layers there lies a chewy, emotional centre. Sometimes us men are just big girls in shiny shoes and nowhere is this more apparent than at a wedding, where we can finally let ourselves go. Like these colossal jessies.

Ok, this bloke might be taking the whole emotion thing a bit too far. From the opening seconds where you think you’re going to witness him upchucking his pre-wedding G&T to the stomping and restraining, you do wonder just how eager he is to get on with the whole first night thing…Glory indeed.

All the women in the congregation are sighing and wishing they had a man who could be as open and emotionally honest as this groom. All the men are counting down the seconds until they can laugh straight in his big teary face. His bride dabbing his tears away with a little silk hankie just makes the whole thing unbearable.

Me. Not so sure about this one. The whole massed audience, the cameras and his pre-prepared speech make us wary that he’s faking it. We’re not going to come right out and say sociopathic tendencies but we’re all thinking it.

If you want more wedding related nonsense then you should stop by the Staggered forum where we spend countless hours scouring the internet for funny wedding stuff, like brides and grooms falling over and best men falling into cakes.

Until next week, happy planning.