Down to the Wire: Choosing My Name

In case you don't know, my fiance has an absolutely fantastic name: Adam Cyril Methodius Solove. Cyril and Methodius are his confirmation saints, the men who brought Christianity to Eastern Europe a millennium ago. Tall, blond, broad-set, hooded eyes, a chiseled nose--Adam is the picture of the Eastern European background that gives him his surname. A. C. M. Solove fits him like a glove.

I'm fairly happy with my born name, too. Alison Michelle Fincher has just the right combination of sweeping feminine and harsher masculine sounds. I am the picture of Anglo-Irishness, so the surname Fincher fits.

I want to make the sybmolic gesture of joining Adam's family by taking his surname. The reality that tiny, Anglo-Irish me must take on a distinctively Eastern European surname cannot be escaped. But what of my middle names?:

Michelle--the middle name given to me by my parents. I have a certain fondness for it.

Lucy--my confirmation saint. Another lovely, feminine name.

Fincher--my maiden name. There are no male Finchers in my generation, so I feel something of an obligation to salvage it in my name.

Alison Michelle Lucy Fincher Solove? I don't think so. But what combination? What do you think?

Offbeat?

I recently discovered a new bridal blog, offbeatbride.com. I don't really like as much as Weddingbee, about which I've posted a great deal, but it's still a fun diversion from writing my dissertation. Most of these weddings are so bizarre and so far-out it's difficult to take them seriously.

Then imagine my surprise when I discovered that, from their perspective I'M AN OFFBEAT BRIDE. Why? Because I'm planning to wear my glasses on my wedding day.

I HATE contact lenses. I hate the wear they adhere to my eye. I hate the panic that sets in when I can't get them out. And love the way I look in my glasses. They offset the roundness of my face and make me look generally a bit more clever.

Does that really make me offbeat? Is it a horrible idea for me to wear my glasses on my wedding day? Here's a picture of my AWESOME glasses. What do you think?

A Walk to Remember: or, When Is a Marriage a Marriage?

I finished watching Doctor Who on BBC iPlayer two days ago. So, when I needed something else to do to waste my time, I found myself fumbling through You Tube for old movies. That's how I ran into A Walk to Remember.

Just in case you missed the 2002 teenage romance, allow me to fill you in. Landon, a popular, somewhat troubled high school boy gets stuck doing community service for his school. In the process, he finds himself spending more and more time with Jamie, the socially outcast, devoutly Christian, minister's daughter. He is initially embarrassed to be seen with her, but slowly learns to admire her quiet faith and conviction to do good. Ultimately, he finds himself in love with her and the life-affirming presence that she represents. She surprises herself by loving him back.

As the story moves towards its climax, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong. "I'm sick," she confesses to him, "I have leukemia." Although he is first devastated and resentful, he resolves himself to helping her through the terrifying experience of death by disease.

What makes the picture particularly beautiful is the way in which he helps her. Earlier in the film, she admits to him that she keeps a "to do list" of all the things she wants to accomplish before she dies. With an unexpected sense of urgency, he helps her with as many of them as he can as her health slowly deteriorates. He takes her to the state line so she can be in two places at once. Her helps her apply a temporary tattoo. He even builds her a telescope so she can observe a comet.

But the most beautiful moment in the film is the moment he asks her to help him meet the goal highest on her list: she wants to get married in her mother's church. She agrees. They marry. And she dies at the end of the summer.

After I finished hysterically crying, the film forced me to think about some of my own less-than-orthodox questions about marriage.

Landon and Jamie truly love each other. Each values the other over his or her own happiness. Their love makes them better, and makes the people around them better, too. They are a part of one another, long before he asks her to marry him. Why aren't they married already? What has the ceremony changed?

As a medievalist, the answer is not as straightforward as you might think. Historically speaking, marriage just requires the consent of two adults in front of witnesses. There are medieval anecdotes of parents who catch their daughters in bed with men. They tell her parents they plan to marry. The parents go back downstairs, considering the marriages valid and binding--which, for all intents and purposes, they were. Even now, the Church recognizes that the priest doesn't administer the sacrament of marriage at all--the couple administers it on themselves. The Church doesn't make two people one: two people decide to become one. All silly anecdotes aside, mutual love and commitment make a marriage, not a priest.

Given that fact, it's difficult to determine what makes the significant difference in what a marriage is if it performed in a church in front of a priest. Landon and Jamie gives themselves to one another a long time before their wedding takes place. And Adam and I decided to become one, to give our lives to each other, a long time ago. I feel irrevocably bound to Adam already. It's virtually impossible to believe either of us could walk away at this point without leaving a piece of ourselves behind.

Obviously there are problems with marriage purely by intention, else the Church wouldn't have bothered to clarify. Marriages require the formal sanction of the Church for our own sakes, to protect the sacramental and legal validity of our marriage. How else can they assure that neither partner is being coerced or misled. Plus, marriage is more than just the formal commitment in ways that Jamie and Landon, and Adam and I, haven't satisfied. I plan to follow the traditions of the Church and to continue talking about and treating Adam as my fiancé, rather than as my husband. Still, the three months that stretch before us seem like an endless formality given what we already spiritually share.

I posted a few weeks ago about what engagement is. I suppose that deserves a clarification. Adam takes the idea of engagement more seriously than I do, but that doesn't mean I'm any less committed to him than he is to me. We are, as I believe many couples are, more than engaged. We've already given our lives to each other. We're just waiting to close the deal.

Please do comment if you have any insight! I know I'm not being particularly orthodox. I'd love to better understand what marriage means.

Invitations: Check!

Thanks for all of your comments and suggestions here and on Facebook. Adam and I decided to go with these, made by Etsy artisan Two Silly Sisters.

Invitations were never high on my priority list, but Adam and I are both very happy and excited about these. They're perfect, just the right mix of traditional and contemporary. Elegant, but not overdone. Not to mention handmade by a small-scale artisan on sustainable paper. Exactly what we were looking for!

I highly recommend working with Etsy. We got exactly what we wanted at a reasonable cost without having to go to a big-name provider. (I'm buying the wedding present on Etsy. Shhh!)

Once we picked the vendor and the design, our only real question was what to do about the response cards. 50-75% of our guests would rather RSVP by e-mail anyway. We settled on a postcard design. That isn't too "new," is it?

Now we just have to finalize the wording. It's amazing how careful you have to be with the way you phrase wedding invitations!

Invitations

Since my mom knows, well, everyone in the town in which Adam and I are getting married, wedding planning has essentially been a breeze. We didn't painstakingly select a caterer or a baker--we used Mom's. Of course, our lack of experience choosing from amongst a large number of candidates has made selecting the few vendors we did have to pick from scratch a bit stressful.

Needless to say, when my mother's printer fell through as a possible source of wedding invitations, chaos reigned. After flirting with the idea of hand-writing them (seemed smart, until we realized we need about 100), Adam and I decided to post a request on Etsy.

For those of you unfamiliar with Etsy, please allow me to explain. Etsy is an on-line marketplace for homemade and vintage crafts, the source for everything from Victorian wedding hats to reusable sandwich bags. I really like Etsy because it's a great political statement. It is possible to shop small, local, and handmade without breaking the bank. It's a positive moral choice... plus everything at Etsy is about 75% cuter and 100% more original than anything you can find at "High Street" shops.

We asked designers to create a simple, elegant--but fairly traditional--invitation in champagne and burgundy. Eco-friendly materials would be a plus. We also gave them a link to my blog to give them an idea what Adam and I are like. And (cringe) we asked them to help us figure out how to do invitations, RSVP cards, and information cards all for a reasonable price.

So far, so good. We've gotten about thirty artisans willing to run our invitations in the last few days. After I rejected bids from anyone breaking our price limit, we still have about ten choices left.

All of the ideas they've sent me have been absolutely gorgeous! Sorry there aren't more specific pictures, but these are the best options so far:

• This one may be my favorite. It really captures the simplicity I was going for.
• This designer didn't post a picture, but she melted my heart by suggesting a design with medieval fonts in our color scheme.
• This designer didn't suggest anything specific, but her work is gorgeous! See anything you like?
• This designer has the most eco-friendly designs.
• This designer says she has a design with a perforated RSVP card that detaches from the invitation to save money and paper. I think it sounds like a great idea. Chic or too much?

How does one choose between invitation designs? Do you have a preference? What about advice for narrowing the field?

If you fall in love with one of our proposals, please contact the seller yourself. Part of my purpose in posting this entry was to promote Etsy awareness and show off some really beautiful art. Besides, you might help us narrow the field by at least one.