Mark OConnell LCSW - Modern Brides & Modern Grooms: A Guide to Planning Straight, Gay, and Other Nontraditional Twenty-First-Century Weddings

Copyright 2014 by Mark OConnell

Foreword copyright 2014 by Liza Monroy

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Danielle Ceccolini

Cover illustration by Dan Parent

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-583-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-049-5

Printed in the United States of America

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of loves light.

Maya Angelou

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Edgar Allan Poe

The sharing of joy... forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Audre Lorde

for Justin

Contents

Foreword

You could not ask for a better partner for the important journey upon which youre about to embark.

And I dont mean your fianc (though Im sure your fianc is wonderful and thats probably a huge part of why youre reading this).

Im talking about actor-artist-psychotherapist-husband-author Mark OConnell, and the journey is but the first step of an even larger one ahead: planning your weddingand the whole life that follows. Marks particular combination of multi-hyphenates makes him the most ideal expert and guide. In a day and age in which theres no boilerplate, no one-size-fits-all definition for what a wedding can or should be (same goes for marriage), Mark emphatically invites you to create your own. Its your big day, but his concrete ideas, guidelines, and marvelous suggestions are sure to help along the way. From the practicaldealing with a limited budget, handling contracts and meddling mothersto the more psychological and emotional elements of asking for help and support, the myth of sexual death in marriage, why not to trust anyone who tells you to just be yourself, the book in your hands is so much more than a wedding guide.

And who better to write such a transcendent guide than a multi-hyphenate who also happens to be in a happy marriage?

Wait, make that: a happy, complex, multifaceted, and real marriage, one that has gone through tests of time, acceptance, and various shades of legality. (On previously mentioned budget limitations: Limitations are liberating... Same-sex couples are experts on limitations, having been denied the right to marry for so long...)

Whether you identify as gay, straight, or somewhere in between, in these pages youll come to realize some essential, distilled truths about your own nature (see the Engulfed or Abandoned quiz) and the human psychology that factors not only into wedding planning, but upon which entire relationships are built. You will find yourself surprised and delighted by the stories, case studies, personal anecdotes, ideas, and advice between these pages. I was, and my own wedding (... um, the third and hopefully final time on this go-round that Ill ever be a bride) is more than a year behind me.

I was married three times by the age of thirty-three, a fact I have always been reticent to openly discuss, but it serves a point here: in a testament to this books universality, I could have put Modern Brides & Modern Grooms to good use in planning any of my three extremely different weddings: 1) at twenty-two, to my gay best friend (to keep him in the country and with me) at a Vegas quickie ceremony presided over by an Elvis impersonator, 2) at twenty-four, to a high school boyfriend turned investment banker at Manhattan City Hall followed by a Mayan ceremony on a Mexican beach that no one could understand (turns out no one could understand the marriage, either) and 3) at thirty-three, to my perfect third-times-a-charm-er in a beautiful redwood grove in California surrounded by friends and family.

I share this to emphasize that no matter what circumstances surround your relationship or what kind of wedding you want, Marks perspective and advice will prove invaluable to working out the kinks and having not only your dream wedding, but better communication with your significant other, family, friends, and in-laws. It takes a village to make a wedding, a celebration and ritual that ultimately is, as Mark writes, a performance: Weddings are theater, and acknowledging this will focus your planning. I know... there are sometimes religious components, cultural traditions, and family values to these affairs to consider. But no matter how you slice and dice it, a wedding is a piece of theater: an entertaining, ritualistic, transformative event.

With any performance, then, comes being watched. One becomes, albeit fleetingly, a celebrity. Never before have I read a wedding book that tackles the subtle complexities of preparing to be watched. As an actor, Mark covers all the performative aspects of weddings and guides us through them starting from the proposal: Mark and his husband Justin, also a multi-hyphenate (lawyer-writer), created Proposal Week, spinning clich proposal traditions into something new, fresh, and completely their own. (Mark and Justins story is also at once both fairytale-like and completely, utterly human. On Justins thirty-fourth birthday, he awoke to a cake of himself as a king, sitting atop a mountain of multicolored cupcakes, which was based on a weird dream he had shared with me when we were twenty-twothis is an excellent couple.) I love the practical budget chart at the end, which is Mark and Justins own.

So dive in, read on, and venture forth on your own journey into wedded bliss. As Mark writes, Theres a whole lot of theater ahead of youhappy, sad, and everything in-between.

With this book, a little luck, and a lot of love, youll be well-equipped to navigate it all.

Liza Monroy

author, THE MARRIAGE ACT: The Risk I Took To Keep My Best Friend in America and What it Taught Us About Love

Santa Cruz, CA

Introduction

Marriage equality has arrived, and its not just for the gays!

This book is for those of you hoping to create a personalized wedding that dignifies your relationship, your individuality, the mutual recognition between you and your partner, and the equality you sharewhether youre of the same or opposite sex.

Weddings are evolving across the board, and so too is the freedom and fun in planning them. Ceremonies (even religious ones), are now more a proclamation of love and commitment, on equal terms, for all couplesand less a public ritual during which one man drags a woman out by the hair and throws her at the feet of another man. In a little over a hundred years, brides have grown from being property to proposing, and now they can also watch their lesbian and gay friends enjoy conjugal kisses (under the law!).

When my husband, Justin, and I were married in 2006, at the age of twenty-nine, I found myself both moved by the past and roused to engage with the future. My gay uncle, Danwho was twenty-nine in 1986, when SCOTUS ruled that same-sex sex was not a Constitutional righttook me aside during our reception and told me, with the sincere shimmer of a tear in one eye, I wasnt sure Id ever see a day like this.