Being Guyanese & Wedding Planning

When you're planning a wedding, there's a lot of things you have to consider. From etiquette, cultural norms and expectations, your family's vision, your vision, your fiancé's vision, and of course, your partner's families vision, expectations, their cultural norms and traditions, and so on. Wedding planning is taking all of those threads and tying them together. If you luck out, you'll plan and execute a wedding that makes everyone happy or most of them, anyway. Either way, you're bound to do something different, wrong, or get a few disapprovals, especially when you're taking different cultures and trying to get them to mesh. Even if you think they are similar.

So, let's start with me. Hi, I'm what you could consider to be as Indo-Caribbean but if you want to get granular, I'm West Indian, specifically Guyanese-American, who was born in New York. This is not a lesson how to be Guyanese, by the way, there's lots of people who are better at it than I am. Growing up, I lived in a Indian & West Indian community and like anyone else in search of a sense of belonging, it was tough. I'm mentioning this as a way of setting up your expectations, when approaching a wedding, I had an idea of what cultural expectations there were, I just don't know what they mean exactly or how to go about them properly.

Here's what I thought we had to do:

• Early or mid-week, the bride gets her mehendi done with her side of the family, but mostly the females. The females would leave little notes or messages in the patterns. 
• On Thursday, manticore is held, which is the religious blessing for the marriage. I think that it's at this time that the bride and groom goes through the wedding turmeric ceremony (Byaha Haath). The details on this one is hazy for me. 
• On Friday, the families of the wedding couple will come together to finish preparations. Whether that is completing the favour bag that is filled with mithai, puri, parsad, or filling boxes with black cake. 
• On Saturday during the day, the groom's family and selected friends goes to the bride's house for the wedding. This is where the religious ceremony takes place and either shortly before (or after) the official documents are signed. 
• Saturday night the bride and groom get into Western wedding clothes (cue the big fluffy white dress), and party at the reception with their families present. 
• Come Sunday, the families of the bride and groom meet up once more whether for lunch or dinner. The wedding festivities are finalized and the happy couple are off to their honeymoon.

Wait... Did I miss something? Yeah, I did. I missed a lot but you can sort that out for yourself by taking the customs of an Indo-Caribbean Hindu Wedding, Hindu Wedding, Pakistan Wedding (which is closest to the rituals that we adhere to), and then tie it together with a bit of German traditions. Can you tell that I had no idea what I was doing? 

I sat with my fiancé and we roughly discussed what we wanted out of the wedding and reception. I read A Practical Wedding and One Perfect Day and I frequented wedding forums but here's the thing, when we sorted out what we wanted, we realized that none of these etiquette manuals could cover what we were going through.

Here's the thing that I've realized though -- wedding planning is like it's own elite group. Perhaps not elite exactly, but brides (and grooms) are exposed to a new set of rules that they were probably not aware of prior. That unless they were actively researching it beforehand. Things like, "You should never throw your own engagement party and the the bride's parents are responsible for that," or "the groom's parents pay for the flowers," or "wedding gifts should not be expected but you as the guest should look to cover your seat." But wait, that last one is regional. Also I don't live in the same state as my parents (as the bride), and the groom's parents are planning to move so we didn't want to bother them with flowers. Oh and let's not forget that in a West Indian wedding, it's all hands on deck, everyone helps where they can because the idea is that it's a community event.

It's been a learning lesson and the way we see it, it's been a like skill set gained. There's a small part of me that chuckles that both he and I have a background in customer service as account managers so in some ways, we've been able to stay ahead of our wedding checklist. Not just that, but we've been able to be at peace with things that just aren't going to quite go our way.

But here's the thing. By doing everything wrong by everyone else's standards, and not quite following one tradition or the other, in some ways, we're left out of the conversation. There aren't really people that I can talk to about my red saree, how over the top our parents are going with different traditions, or trying to tie it all together.