So if you ever want to hear a whole bunch of people’s opinions about the Right Way to Have a Wedding, the best thing to do is tell people you’re getting married, and then I guarantee you will be up to your armpits in other people’s opinions. For me, personally, the hearing everyone’s opinion part was not the number one reason I asked Dorothy to marry me—I asked her to marry me because I love her— but as soon as we tell people, everyone takes this as their personal hand-delivered invitation to tell us exactly what we must do.
“You must line the aisle with candles,” says Dorothy’s best friend Nikki, like as soon as we tell her, like before she even says congratulations. “And the candles should ascend in height, all the way up the aisle, as a symbol for how your love and commitment grow stronger and burn brighter every day.”
“We’re trying to keep things small and simple,” I say. “We really don’t want our wedding to turn into a big, complicated production.”
“But, Peter, you have to have candles,” Nikki says. “Otherwise, how will the half- blind love- demon transcribe your names in the Book of Eternal Devotion?”
“Ooh.” Dorothy cringes. “I forgot about the transcription of names in the Book of Eternal Devotion by the half-blind love-demon.”
I squirm. “You don’t think that’s a little old- fashioned? I mean, my cousin Jeremy didn’t have candles at his wedding, and his marriage turned out fine, even without the love- demon’s transcription of names.”
Dorothy darts her eyes at me and I know what she’s thinking. Wasn’t my cousin Jeremy just last week complaining about the new carpets his wife bought for the second Flailing Sanctuary they installed in their aboveground Prayer Hut? Maybe they’d have better communication skills if they’d had candles at their wedding so the half-blind love-demon could accurately transcribe their names in his book. I can tell this is a battle I’m not going to win, but I stress again, “Obviously, we can’t do everything. We’re trying to keep things simple.”
Nikki is unmoved by this argument. “Okay, but how complicated is it to get candles? I’m not saying you should rent a blimp or something. It’s candles. You can literally get them at the Rite Aid.”
Dorothy looks at me with her big hazelnut- chocolate eyes and I know this is something she wants—even though she’s the one who said in the first place that we should keep things simple.
“Well, let’s just see what they have at the Rite Aid,” I offer.
Dorothy lights up like the Yuletide Hogfire and I resign myself to the idea that we are definitely going to have candles of ascending height lining the aisle at our wedding.
But the main thing everyone has an opinion about is when in the ceremony to sacrifice the goats to the Stone God.
“You want to do it early,” says my mother. “That way you get it out of the way and everyone knows the Stone God has been appeased, so this is a legal and blessed marriage.”
“Are you kidding?” says my little brother. He’s studying to be a goat slaughterer at the university, so of course he has a lot of ideas about everything. “You know how much blood that is? You have to do the slaughtering at the end, otherwise you’re going to slip in goat guts while you’re doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite and the blood will get all over your marriage cloak and the video will end up on one of those wedding fail blogs.”
In that moment, I don’t have the heart to tell him we’re not even planning on doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and we probably aren’t going to be wearing traditional marriage cloaks, and we definitely aren’t hiring a videographer.