White Wedding -- by Anne Shier

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Sella who, more than anything, dreamed of getting married to a “knight in shining armour,” galloping off into the sunset on a white horse and living happily ever after. From the time of her childhood she has dreamed of him. He was tall with dark hair and so handsome it took her breath away. The real trick would be finding this knight, this prince, if ever there were such a man. Minor inconvenience, she thought. I’ll meet a special man one day who fits the bill.

        She wanted a white wedding with a white, flowing wedding dress, complete with a white veil and long white train. She would have her own bouquet of fresh, beautiful blue and white roses. Her three young bridesmaids would be in long dresses the same shade of blue as her blue roses and would have their own similar blue and white rose bouquets. There would be a little flower girl strewing blue and white rose petals onto the floor of the church just before Sella, the beautiful and breathtaking bride, marched slowly down the aisle to meet her handsome groom. God, I wish I had some idea of who the groom will be.

Of course all this cost money, which she did not necessarily have right now, but again, she thought, Minor inconvenience. If I let money stop me from having the wedding of my dreams, I may as well give up dreaming right now.

So Sella started what she referred to as her “wedding fund,” putting aside money from each paycheque, starting in her teen years, to pay for everything a bride would need: her beautiful and very expensive wedding dress, the minister, church, invitations, reception hall, wedding cake, dinner, liquor, flowers, fancy candles, bridesmaids’ and flower girl’s outfits, limousines and so on. She even put aside some money for the ushers’ and groom’s tuxedos. Have I left out anything?

The only thing Sella would not put aside any money for was her diamond engagement ring and their two wedding bands. She wanted her groom to look after these details and pay for them too. And she did not want these items to be cheap. Look, my darling, I’m not asking for the earth, am I? Your expenses are not going to be nearly as great as mine. However, it’s my wedding, so just go with the flow and accept it. That’s the way it is.

When Sella became a young adult, she knew she also had to start making plans of a different sort. While still saving faithfully for her big day, she now had to make concrete plans to first meet her ideal man and then persuade him that marrying her would be the best thing he could possibly do. How in heaven’s name am I ever going to meet the guy I’ll be spending the rest of my life with? Meeting him is one thing, but getting him to propose marriage is quite another. How is it going to be possible to meet suitable men?

Sella pondered long and hard about how to meet eligible men—a lot of them—and how to make a suitable choice. She knew going out to bars and nightclubs was not a good place to start because people going to bars were not generally looking for a mate. Better approaches were online dating (using Instant Messaging), joining a dating service or developing a hobby or two, which would allow her to meet men with similar interests.

How much time do I need to meet the man of my dreams? It was hard to say because relationships between the sexes were often not straightforward—they were usually complicated, and there was never a guarantee of any kind. If Sella wanted a greater probability of success, she would have to pick a dating method that would expose her to many diverse eligible men, allow her to ask some very pertinent questions of each one, and then start excluding those that did not qualify for the job of husband. In essence, she would have to go shopping for a husband. If she wanted to find perfect or almost perfect “husband material,” she would have to be particular about the kind of man she wanted to marry. Where and how to start looking for him was the big question right at the moment.

Sella had heard assorted things about online dating so she wondered if she should start with that method. She had seen TV advertisements about companies like eHarmony.com that described happy couples who had met and even married because of meeting online through this dating web site. Each person had to first fill out a detailed questionnaire with the idea that if a man and woman had enough likes and dislikes in common, they might want to spend more time together. Sella decided to give it a try for six months, reasoning that if she did not find a suitable man in that timeframe, she would quit and start all over again using another method.

Shortly after becoming a member of the eHarmony online dating community, she met several men online and chatted with them, but for some reason something was not right about any of them. Not that they were bad people or even bad potential mates—there were other, more important issues like the long distance between their residences and the times that each person was available for online dating. On a couple of occasions, just as Sella thought that she was finally making good progress with someone she’d met, he would suddenly indicate a preference for another woman he was also chatting with online. It all became too time-consuming and frustrating, and she decided it was a complete waste of her time. She decided to try something else.

Sella had also heard about speed-dating. Because she didn’t really know anything about it, she did some research. It intrigued her because she discovered that she could meet a lot of men, in person, for a few minutes each, in a relatively short period of time. It would all be conducted in a public forum, such as a community hall, and many other people would be there at the same time doing the exact same thing. There would be no fear of being alone with the wrong person since there would always be other people present. Ideally, it was a dating-like situation in which you had just enough time to ask a few questions of each other and get a feel for each other. If it worked like it was meant to, speed-dating might be just enough to make Sella want to see a particular person again. She could only hope that she was also going to make a favourable impression on him at the time they first met so that he would feel the same way as her about a possible relationship.

While the odds of meeting her ideal man might not be any better than with online dating, Sella knew that she could meet many more men in a much shorter period of time. She would not be wasting her precious time as in online dating; she could exclude men as she met them and would also know why she was excluding them. Hopefully, it would narrow the field of male prospects down to a manageable number and thus, take less time in the long run to find the man she did want.

Fortunately, after several attempts at speed-dating, she had met three men she would seriously consider for marriage. As she thought about her reasons for considering each man eligible, she realized it was because of the sort of questions she’d asked each of them and the answers she’d gotten. Some of the questions were: Are you married? Are you gay? Are you working? Do you want children? Do you live in this city?

Their answers to the first two questions had to be no for the interview to proceed successfully. After that, the answers had to be yes for the most part. These men could be easily excluded by their answers, assuming they were being honest.

For the honesty part, she relied on her intrinsic knowledge of body language to tell her things that could not be easily verbalized. As she got more experienced at speed-dating, she realized it was an efficient way to meet members of the opposite sex without having to make the emotional investment that one usually had to make in a budding romantic relationship. Sella developed her own questions to ask and at the same time became very good at reading their facial expression, body position and tone of voice.

Eventually she was also going to have to ask each man more delicate and detailed questions about the type of wedding he wanted and the financial commitment he was prepared to make toward it. Sella did not tell anyone that she had already been busy all these years saving for the wedding that she wanted. That would make their decision about marrying me too easy, wouldn’t it? But I am not going to make it easy for any man to choose me. My groom-to-be will have to prove his willingness to share all of the wedding expenses equally; if he is not willing to do that, then I will have to exclude him too.

Satisfied that she was now making real progress toward her ultimate goal, she set about designing a unique type of questionnaire that would be sure to “separate the men from the boys,” so to speak. That is, she would have to ask some very specific questions that each man had to answer without tripping over his tongue. He had to be confident in his answers. Then she would know that he was being honest and sincere and that she could trust the man she would ultimately choose. That essential quality of honesty would be the most important criterion in determining who her groom would be. If he was also tall, dark-haired and good looking, that would be fantastic. However, the quality of his character and personality would help her the most in making the “right” decision. Her prince, the groom, would be the man she wanted to be happily married to for the rest of her life. There would be no going back.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA