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.
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