Last Friday you met Emily, who will be blogging weekly about her adventures in wedding planning. (Living here and doing the ceremony in Nashville—definitely an adventure.) Today meet Josh, who is having his wedding right here in Washington. He's going to give the groom's perspective on it all, and trust me, it's going to be good. Check back every Wednesday for his update on the laughs and landmines of planning a wedding for 200.

I am not a groomzilla! I am not a groomzilla! Maybe if I say it often enough, I can get myself to believe it. Of course, here I am writing a blog for The Washingtonian, so I guess that alone sort of qualifies me as one, right? That and the fact that when our wedding planner found out that the magazine was looking for a groom to blog, I was the first person she thought of! So I guess I am one—or at least, pretty close. Anyway, without further ado, I am proud to present the first installment of “The Reluctant Groomzilla” or, as I’m sure my soon-to-be-legions of fans and loyal readers will call it, TRG.

I’m big on mission statements, or at least I am in my working life. So when I sat down to try to figure out what I was going to write in this space, I started by trying to write a mission statement. Of course, I hated everything I came up with, so basically you’re going to get me rambling about what’s going on with planning my wedding. The idea (according to the good folks at The Washingtonian) is to get a groom’s point of view on planning a wedding, the work that goes into it, and the emotions it brings. Well, it’s a lot of work, and you’ll experience every emotion in the book—from gut-wrenching frustration to absolute exhilaration. So we’re done here, right? Not so fast!

My fiancée and I got engaged in August. (I’ll save the details for another post.) We’ve been seriously dating for the last few years but met back in college in the fall of 1995. Our story is one of those long, complicated ones, but the important thing is that we’re both incredibly happy to be spending the rest of our lives together. We live in Northwest DC with our four-legged kid, a beagle/basset mix named Milo. My fiancée is a government lawyer, and I work in the hotel industry. Her family lives in the Philadelphia suburbs after immigrating from Israel (this will come into play as the story develops) and mine is spread throughout the United States, but we’ve both lived in and around DC since going to college here, so we decided to have the wedding here.

We’re getting married in October, so we have a few months before the big day, but we have a lot of big-ticket items like the venue, wedding planner, photographer, and band already taken care of. We’re very lucky to have her dad picking up most of the bill, and while we’re not going crazy (I’ll tell you how much it costs to have Michael Bublé sing at your wedding), we don’t have to cut too many corners. Her family is a lot larger than mine, but we want to have lots of friends and colleagues there as well, so we’re anticipating about 200 guests.

At this point, planning the wedding has been fun—kind of like putting together a big party for a bunch of friends. But I can see that things are going to get rougher, and the decisions harder, as the process goes on. My fiancée and I are both Type-A personalities with strong opinions, and we like getting what we want. We’re usually pretty good at compromising with each other, but I definitely think this will push us to our limits. In one respect, I’m lucky she isn’t the type of woman who’s been envisioning her dream wedding since she was a little girl, so things aren’t set in stone—but on the other hand, if she doesn’t like something, there’s no way it’s happening no matter how much I want it to, so I’m sure sparks will fly.

I’m definitely excited to share my experience with you guys (and gals) and hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Leave any questions or thoughts in the comments section, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Thoughts? Questions? Like he said—leave them below. 

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