Reader “Anonymous Fiancée” writes:
“Hello, I think your website sucks, it makes me angry within the first 30 seconds of reading anything written on it. Not all guys are assholes like this.
“Some of them actually WANT to be married because they have found a girl who can not only be their love, but also their best friend. They have fallen in love with their perfect girl. This website shows no support in favor of what marriage really is.
“It is not a horribly, ghastly ending to a man’s single life. If a fiancé really feels this way, he shouldn’t be getting married. Any man who truly enjoys this site should not be getting married. End of story.”
And Happy Holidays to you, Anonymous Fiancée!
In a cold December full of blizzards, your email has warmed our hearts. It fills us with holiday joy. It’s a throwback to the good old days, when we first launched the site, when we received hate-mail by the truckloads. We’re nostalgic.
Since then? The uproar has quieted. The outrage has faded. An alarming number of girlfriends, wives, brides, and even self-described “bridezillas” read the site, like the site, and write into the Ask the Expert column. We find this disturbing. So it’s nice to know that someone out there, in fact, still hates our guts.
But enough affected indifference. Believe it or not, we’ll squarely address your question.
Here’s the thing: we agree with you. Or at least with part of what you say. Mainly, we agree that “[marriage] is not a horribly, ghastly ending to a man’s single life. If a fiancé really feels this way, he shouldn’t be getting married.”
You’re 100% right. If a man truly feels that way–or even if he kinda-sorta feels that way–he shouldn’t be getting married. End of story. Anyone getting engaged should respect his wife, respect his relationship, and respect the institution of marriage.
Now here’s where we differ.
It is our fundamental assumption–our core premise–that any dude getting married also shares that view. We’re not trying to sell guys on marriage, because, we assume, they’ve already bought it. And if they haven’t bought that premise, there are deeper forces at play, and they’re not changing their minds based on what we, a few faceless jerks, say on a website.
Besides… if we hated marriage, do you really think we would launch and operate this site for a living?
That doesn’t mean, however, that we speak of marriage with holy, sacrosanct, humorless language. Who the hell wants to read that? So we make jokes. Sure, we’ll refer to the wedding as walking the plank, not because we actually think it’s like death, but because we refuse to be asshats who write stuff like, “Your wedding will constitute a sacred bond, a treasured treaty that will unite your wife and yourself with a lifetime of shared joy and companionship.” Yes, we believe all that. And yes, writing that makes us want to barf.
We think that every guy should love his wife. And we think and hope that guys–if the partnership is right, if they’re ready, and if they’re not billionaire golfers–really will like marriage.
We do not, however, think that they will like the pageantry of “wedding planning.” We’re pro-marriage. We’re not pro-wedding-planning. Our core mission is to help the couple survive the process, and our role in this–and sometimes it takes tough love, sometimes it takes sarcasm–to get the groom into shape.
It’s not for everyone. We’re irreverent, we’re brutally honest, and, yes, at times we’re assholes. (Just ask our families.) We like to think, though, that we make this strange, bewildering, rocky journey a lot easier for a lot of guys, and give them some (admittedly modest) entertainment along the way.
So yes, we suck. Every day we suck the juice of life and it gives us the strength to address the unholiest of all topics, wedding planning.
Happy Holidays,
The Plunge
