This is sort of loosely a response to this post over at A Practical Wedding, talking about how wedding sexism isn't limited to brides becoming bridezillas - grooms are very often left out of the entire process, and not by the brides. Society does its very best to ignore grooms whenever it comes to wedding planning.

Now, for anyone who for some reason is reading this and doesn't know me, I actually enjoy most "traditional" gender roles. I certainly don't think women OR men should be forced into gender roles, but I think it's just as ridiculous to expect all women to shun tradition and become career-oriented ladder climbers. Feminism is about freedom of choice, not about breaking all the rules if you happen to like those roles. I like wearing pretty dresses, cooking things from scratch, and having dinner on the table for my boy when he comes home (mind, we don't live together - my other blog has a whole post on that - but I still cook him dinner when I can). I sincerely hope we're financially about to live off one paycheck once we have children so I can stay home to keep house and raise babies instead of paying someone else to do it for me. I wear aprons to cook and big flowered hats to garden, and I'm perfectly content being an old-fashioned housewife in a lot of ways. Of course, I'll be off to the theatre every chance I get, but still.

Even with my preference towards traditional gender roles, it still burns me up that men are so left out of the planning process. Even most other women I'm sure would say, "Oh, he doesn't really care about the details" or worse, "It's YOUR wedding". Many of them held that view with their own weddings, I'm sure. But. Um. It's not my wedding. It's OUR wedding, as in it's the beginning of OUR marriage, which is something we certainly intend to be a joint effort even if I do want to be the one baking pies and dusting furniture.

And yes, I am aware that some grooms really don't care. I'm aware that MY groom doesn't really care that much about the details...but the thing is, some grooms do. And even though Scott doesn't really care what kind of paper we print our invitations on, I still don't make those decisions without him. He deserves the chance to say, "Um, no, I'd rather have something a little less flowery" or "Honey, we should have SOME kind of decoration on these railings". This wedding is a representation of both of us. Both of our styles, both of our opinions. I'm certainly not going to plan anything without his approval.

Maybe that's where some of this came from - maybe this whole "it's all about the bride" mentality is at least partly due to the fact that weddings were something women owned, something women could plan without having to get male approval on everything. Society just took the idea and bastardized it. Let's hope the recent bridezilla trend is the deepest bastardization this particular fashion will see, and then like all fashions through history, it will revert to something else. Something better.