party planning committee.

I met with my wedding planner last night.

Ugh, I know. I go back and read that statement and I am already annoyed with myself. Doesn't "wedding planner" seem like such an unnecessary job? The fact that a title like that exists indicates that society has gone nuts and is too concerned about the wrong things in life. Not that I have much idea what the right things are, but planning weddings is not in the list.

I guess the idea is that throwing a wedding is stressful, not to mention time and labor-intensive. Most people who are doing it have not done it before, so they should hire a professional, right? I guess that makes sense, but I just don't want to pay money for this service. I'm cheap, and weddings are already expensive.

The thing is, it did not take me long after my engagement to figure out that some women are just not that into wedding stuff, and I am one of them. If someone was offering to take care of the wedding stuff and I just had to show up, that would be pretty darn okay with me. Men get to do that. It is completely acceptable for a groom's eyes to glaze over with disinterest as soon as someone starts talking about invitations and centerpieces. But I'm supposed to care deeply. And I tried, but I don't. I feel like a failure as a woman.

It's not that I don't care at all. But while getting engaged seems to be an excuse to look at magazines and blogs for hours on end, filling a folder with pictures and ideas, I haven't been interested in doing any of that.

Back in high school, when I was going to prom, the mother of my boyfriend called and asked me what color of rose I wanted in my corsage. There were two options, and I swear I think they were both some shade of red, though the descriptions were meant to obfuscate that fact. I told her that either one would be fine, because it didn't matter to me. She insisted that I pick one, because I might care someday. If I didn't care about a flower I wore on my wrist for a few hours when it was actually happening, why would I care later? But I picked one, and it was fine. At least, I don't remember anything about the corsage other than the telephone conversation about the color.

That's how I feel about wedding stuff. It's all one big day of corsages, and I'm supposed to spend months picking out the colors.

So I hired a planner. I offered to pay one of my friends, Carney, who is not a professional, but is already more interested in my wedding than I am. When she found out that we were engaged, she asked all kinds of questions that I hadn't even known were part of it. While the idea of paying some random stranger who really likes weddings to care about my big day sounds awful, I don't mind paying someone I know, who cares both because she likes weddings and because she likes me and Josh. Problem solved.

I met with her last night, our first planning session. We looked through some magazines she brought, and I quickly got bored. Looking through wedding magazines is a lot more fun when you're not actually planning one. If you are just imagining some future fairy tale event, it can be anything you want. But when you are thinking of an actual date and an actual man, it's not as fun. Anything you want probably costs too much.

We didn't decide anything. We did determine that I was not very interested in wedding planning. She frustrated me by asking about my official wedding colors and I frustrated her by being stubborn, obtuse, and generally uncooperative.

But I realized that hiring Carney was a great decision. Not only is she genuinely interested in the whole thing, she does a good job of figuring out what I want. Because if you ask me a question like, "What is your theme going to be?" I just sort of scowl and ask whether I have to have a theme, themes are stupid. But then she started asking me specific questions that were less about weddings and more about what kind of things Josh and I like, and those questions were easier.

I feel much more confident about being able to pull the whole thing off. She can tell me that I have to pick a corsage color (or a theme or a centerpiece), and then she can help me figure out the answer. I mean, it may be pulling teeth for her, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.