It turns out that planning a wedding is a lot of work, and more than a little unsettling. As I skip from website to website, researching possible wedding locations, budget menus, and the boring nuts-&-bolts-y stuff like (sigh) plate rentals, I keep bumping up against an odd and (to me) nauseating sentiment: splash pages for various caterers, coordinators, and vendors often include tacit or explicit reassurance that on your wedding day, you’re a princess.

I don’t know where to start with this, so let’s start with yuck!

And now let’s look at some underlying assumptions:

The caterers need not address themselves to anyone but the princess the bride the broad, and possibly her mother; the groom is incidental to the process.

Every woman wants to be wrapped up in gossamer and fairy dust on her wedding day. (A quieter assumption, but no less pervasive: she’ll be sporting some pretty fierce high-compression undergarments to keep the telltale bulges of humanity under wraps.*)

This iconic creature, The Bride, is made of spun sugar and fractious nerves, and needs soothing.

Um. Did I say “yuck”? Oh. Well, good. Because yuck!

BOUNCY-CASTLE But now it’s true-confessions time. It’s true that I have no desire for the sparkly dress with the swooping skirt or the tiara or the horse-drawn carriage, because, y’know, I finished playing Cinderella when I was a child.

But.

I confess that I must have some lurking princess fantasy, given the pangs I suffered upon admitting to myself that we could not justify renting a bouncy castle.

*I’m uncharacteristically blasé about getting a dress. In fact, I’ve established only one inflexible guideline: I must be able to wear normal underthings with it. Oh, and to sit on the ground with kids.

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