What’s In a Name? When you’re Getting Married, It Feels Like A Lot!

Marriage License Signing 2
Marriage License Signing 2 (Photo credit: Scott SM)

When planning your wedding, as a woman in our society, you get to contemplate whether or not you will take your partner’s name.  Some women have known all their lives that they’d be transitioning along the way, others have watched friends’ adventures as they hyphenated, kept their own, or invented new names. Some guys are very giving on this issue.  My stepsister and her husband BOTH hyphenate.  We have another set of friends where the gentleman (he’s the real deal, you’ll see) took his wife’s name so that her family’s line would not die out. Oh, that’s nutty, crunchy California, you must be thinking. But no – they are in that bastion of old-fashioned traditional behavior, Mississippi.  A gentleman indeed.

 

So what to do? I spend a lot of time in this space talking about not following the crowd, and respecting your instincts as you make decisions about your wedding.  I’d like to think that if you replace the word “wedding” with the word “life,” most of the advice can be extrapolated, since it’s mainly about being who you are, and trusting your choices.  This decision requires you to flex those emotional muscles in the most literal way possible, and to think hard about what you need to “be yourself.” One thing I know: it’s not all in a name. Not by a long shot.

 

Be well, and love well.

 

Dinah

Millionaire Matchmaking, Bachelorettes, and those crazy housewives

Reality TV is a fact of life these days. Finding your Mr. Or Ms. Right on national television? I’m pretty sure that’s official country song wrong place number 23 to look for love. There are, however, things to be learned from the seekers of everlasting happiness and romance in prime time.

Patty Stanger, “The Millionaire Matchmaker” on Bravo, spends an hour a week matching up difficult personalities. The editing surely makes things a) more amusing and b) less frustrating than they appear in the tiny mirror on the side of our guilty-pleasure-mobiles. But Patty does have some valuable things to say (and some funny ones to be sure).

The most important advice I’ve heard her give is “make love a priority and love will come.” the same needs to be true after love has been found. When planning your wedding, love still has to be the priority so that it will know how to stick around.

The Bachelorette is incomprehensible to me, personally. It’s some perverse version of sorority rush with all the catty parts and none of the redeeming sisterhood. If you can learn anything from this one, it’s be careful what you wish for. And for goodness sake, don’t wish to be locked up in a house full of weepy overly made up, emotionally underdeveloped girls.

Last but not least we have the Unsinkable Kim Wozniak, of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. She found her latest football player love at a charity event she was attending to support another housewife’s penchant for dancing badly in public. And now she’s (on the show) about to pop with a new baby boy. Now that’s one way to make love stick around

The reality tv trend has got to hit a wall at some point. Let’s keep the super glam wedding shows and dispense with the drama. Is anybody with me?

Where’s my remote?

-Dinah

My Little Marital Advice Shop: Setting Yourself Up To Fail (cough – Kim Kardashian)

Kim Kardashian at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festiv...
Mrs. Humphries

Yahoo’s OMG! big scoop today – Kim Kardashian Says Married Life So Far Has ‘Not Been Ideal’

I have three reactions.  From three perspectives.

1)  Perspective: Jewish Grandmother

Ideal? Who ever said anything about ideal? This is marriage sweetheart!  It takes work. And patience.  And matzoh ball soup.

2)  Perspective: Mine ( a year into a very happy marriage to a wonderful husband)

During wedding planning, don’t fall too deep into Ponies & Rainbows fairy-tale land.  They sweep up the rose petals, and suddenly there’s this thing called day-to-day life  If you’ve been obsessed with being the Princess Bride, the turning back into a pumpkin part is rough.

3) Perspective: your average fourth grader

Um, how does she expect things to be good? She’s making her new husband live with her sister, her baby, and the guy who’s the baby’s dad.  And they’re on TV.

Bottom line?  Know that life is never “ideal” to begin with, and you’re a hundred miles ahead of Kim Kardashian.

Hasta la blogsta-

Dinah