You know who is probably not being showered with enough gifts and attention just for making the huge relationship decision she and her significant other made recently? The bride-to-be in your life. Hear me out.

If the world of wedding blogs is a candy-colored, calligraphed, calla-lillied carnival, then wedding Instagram is without a doubt that carnival’s champagne-wasted, sugar-high sideshow. When I got engaged, I started following The Knot, thinking it would set a fire under my ass to get me to start planning. Then, little…

Is there any reason to want engagement photos? Of course not, say the newly engaged, and the unengaged, and me, once upon a time. What is the overall point, for starters? To show off that you and him can stand on a rock? To show off your pink polyester blouse? To show off that your ring can go onto the stem of a leaf?…

For the past eight weeks I’ve been waking up and doing 135 crunches before I do anything else. I pad into the living room at 7:10 a.m., unroll my yoga mat, hook my toes under the hem of our IKEA couch, and crunch, barely awake. I do 15 where my wrists graze the tops of my knees, 15 where my fingertips tap the tops of…

I did not expect to give any shits about veils, to be honest. They are just one or a few layers of airy fabric, and they are usually only available in like, three colors, and like, four styles, and all you do is poke them into the back of your head for like, 30 minutes, and for what reason? I never thought of veils at…

Everything is going great! will be my last words, just as they are for so many others—right before Satan’s pitchfork sails through the space between my back ribs, pierces my heart and lungs in one sanguine grab, and I am hauled away, bobbing like a chunk of sirloin on a kebab, down all the flights of stairs to hell,…

Is it the hardening of one’s heart that makes one less and less impervious to envy with each passing issue of Martha Stewart Weddings as one’s wedding clock ticks and ticks on? My wedding clock admonishes, “Nine months left, young lady!” and with that I book and book, plan and plan, dig and dig myself further into the…

It is one thing to wince at the glow of a Real Wedding staring back at you from a blog, to scroll through—one eye closed, the other wide open—the documentation of a Real Day That Really Happened for One Real Couple. In most cases, behind the curtains of hanging moss and curls of calligraphy, you can almost see glints…

If you were to ask me about my dress shopping right when I’d started the process, I’d probably gush all over your face about the incredible power of seeing oneself as wholly beautiful for the first time, the unprecedented bonding opportunity between mother and daughter that is picking out the latter’s first-ever…

Recently, I looked back at the preliminary wedding budget my fiancee Joe and I had come up with it about six months ago after approximately 16 seconds of internet research. Now, I’ve realized that it was all so horrifically off-base, it might as well have been written in ancient runes. It was like when you ask a…

If you’ve ever dared to utter the “W”-word in conversation with a group of 20-somethings in a major American metropolis, chances are you’ve opened the door to an onslaught of stock responses. Pew-pew-pew! Like little silver BBs they fly out of people’s mouths, these most disparaging opinions about weddings, aimed not…

Not gonna lie: I’ve been sort of nailing it these past couple weeks in the wedding planning department. I’ve narrowed down my dress to just two gorgeous contenders, we’re about to sign a contract with a wonderful caterer, and we’ve decided we’re going to design our own paper suite. For the first time as a bride-to-be,…

Over the course of three short days last week, my mother and I went shopping for dresses, both hers and mine. It was my first crack at it, and we trotted around Manhattan and Brooklyn at a fever pitch: five appointments for me, four hours spent looking for a dress for her, and countless moments spent in the throes of…

Last week I officially passed the “one year left” mark on my wedding planning calendar. Between celebrating and freaking out, I realized I had to get to work on the Next Big Thing on my planning to-do list: Finding a caterer. My mother was insistent. My dad, resolute: “There has to be food!”

When Joe and I adopted Cheddar, a scared, three-year-old blonde terrier mutt who looked like a small, fat, elderly lion, I was excited to have our first shared responsibility. It was a first step toward a long life of joining forces and making real, living things happier and healthier and stronger than they would…

On a scale of one to ten—one being Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who is literal royalty and has never touched a scissor, and ten being Martha Stewart’s youngest, thirstiest Craft Assistant, who probably got engaged at a goose farm last June and has an Exacto knife in place of one of her Jamberry nail wraps—I’d say…

A good reason to not marry me is that I am not exactly a financial genius. While I’ve always been good at making my own money rather than asking for it (except for when I asked the federal government for $50,000 to go to college with and they were like, “Yes, def,”), paying bills the moment my paycheck dumps into my…

Does my engagement ring conjure a force field when I wield it against prying men? It feels as though it should. It certainly became my new knee-jerk protector—just as a middle finger, rolled eyes, and a husky “fuck you” were back in my single days.

Before I met my fiancé, I believed that true love existed in clothes and not much else. A silk blouse that flowed softly like a nice dinner date, a floral sundress that swung at the hips like the prom dance I never had, a pair of tight little shorts that hugged my butt hot as sex—I hunted these things, but not love.

Wherein our columnist, currently in early stages of planning her wedding, has a GChat conversation with her fiancé to discuss how, exactly, this shit is going to go down.