Okay, I think I may have mentioned before that I find the whole process of choosing invitations for weddings to be entirely too complicated and expensive and not at all interesting. Well, that was when we were looking at save-the-dates. The other day, I spent a few hours of my life looking at invitations, and those thoughts have been reinforced.

I firmly belong to the Outlook school of inviting. This means that if it's not in Outlook, it doesn't exist as as far as I'm concerned. The best invitations are the ones that I get via e-mail, preferably with a link to download them automatically to Outlook. However, I was told that this is simply not acceptable in the context of a wedding, so off we went to spend good money on something that 50 percent of people are going to throw out, 45 percent of people are going to stick on their refrigerator, and 5 percent of chattering busybodies will actually care about and get all in a tizzy if it isn’t up to spec! According to the stationery person we're using, I'm not a “paper person.” Oh, well!

Anyway, we went to her office to look at samples. This process involved massive “books” that could be used as alternatives to weight plates in an Olympic weightlifting contest. There are variations on themes, themes with variations, and some that were plain ugly. Then there were choices to be made about RSVP cards, rehearsal cards, thank-you cards, calligraphy, custom postage, fonts, lining and “wallpaper,” and on and on and on and on and on.

We finally picked what we wanted and started deciding what they would actually say. I'm not exactly the most formal person in the world, and it was a real fight to convince the powers that be that I didn’t want to use my middle name. After losing that battle (shocker!), I pretty much disengaged from the process and decided to go with the flow. Then we got the quote for all of this stationery goodness. Suddenly my Outlook mentality looked a little more reasonable to my fiancée!

In the end, we scaled back what we're doing but aren't doing Outlook invitations. I hope people will like them and they won’t all end up in the trash. I doubt I'll ever be a paper person, and maybe I can get enough mileage out of this to get something I want!

Josh, Bridal Party’s guest-blogging groomzilla, writes every Wednesday about the groom’s perspective on wedding planning and everything that comes with it. To follow his story from the beginning, click here.