Here come the bride(s)?

Hello all! This is the local other half of that lovely lady who has been keeping up this blog. I figure it's about time I weigh in on here. So here I go.

Although we have been engaged for over 4 years now, it never really crossed my mind until we set the date that I was going to be a bride. I am told it is normal to have a bit of an identity shock--being a bride is that culturally loaded.

I knew that were I set to the task of coordinating linens with our matching wedding colors, or rather the task of discerning whether or not our colors matched at all, I would fail. If left to my own devices, I would walk out to greet the day wearing fuchsia stripes and chartreuse polka dots--not out of any avant garde fashion statement, just general and sincere inability to see what exactly the difference is between matching and clashing. So help me, if one of two articles of clothing covers your top half and the second covers the bottom, that should constitute a matching outfit! Though I have been many times over informed that this is not so. But I digress.

When it comes down to it, I don't consider myself a bride. I just don't fit into that role in my head and don't feel a need to fit into it. Did that, in turn, make me a groom? If either of us is the groom, it's certainly me. I considered this for a while and even picked up a wedding planner for grooms while M poured over a stack of tomes for bridal success. By the time I had bypassed the section on pre-nups and got to the chapter on bachelor party strippers, I decided I was by no means a groom. Anyway that didn't make sense for us as a couple. We're a little too nontraditional to have a bride and a groom combo. And I don't really think I'm politically correct enough to be a "partner."

I was musing on this for a while when I remembered being a little kid and hearing the term "bridegroom." Or bride/groom as I heard it. The first thing that had come to my mind then was that a bridegroom was someone who wasn't a bride or a groom, but was something in the middle. Someone who was both.

So that's what we've settled on as our designations. We're a bride and a bride/groom. And that seems to work out perfectly for us.