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She stirred her matcha latte that rested on the coffee table in their living room area. It was her first attempt at making one and, frankly, she wasn’t fully convinced she did all that good of a job. Should she have used regular milk in place of almond milk? Did she use too much matcha? Does she just not like matcha?
She walked over the sink and poured it down the drain. She considered making another but instead opted for making a cold brew with the cold brew concentrate Todd uses every morning. As she walked back from the kitchen, the loaf of banana bread she made over the weekend caught her eye. She already felt like she had eaten too much of it but the thought of having another slice covered in butter was too much to overcome.
“Screw it,” she thought.
Taking a knife from the drawer and the butter out of the refrigerator, she put a thick layer of it atop the bread and brought it over to the coffee table on a plate. Sperry sniffed it but then went back to sitting on the dog bed situated in the corner.
“Ughhhhhhhh,” she groaned to herself. “I do not want to deal with this today.”
Up until this point, she was just delaying. It wasn’t that she was dreading the final product of her wedding website, but the effort that was going to have to go into it was overwhelming her. From her fashion and food blogs, she knew the work it was going to take in order to make it look exactly the way she wanted it.
She clicked open the folder of engagement photos that were sent to her by their photographer earlier that week. “I look so fucking fat,” she thought. “And honestly, can’t he just, like, remove the watermark from the corner of the photos so I can use them on here without promoting the fuck out of his site?”
She had already paid the $120 for a Squarespace site rather than going the cheaper route of creating her site through The Knot, a recommendation Katie had given her. “But Katie’s wedding site looked like shit,” she had told Caroline over drinks earlier that week.
Her first order of business was choosing a template. Attempting to choose from what felt like hundreds didn’t feel conducive to finding the perfect one, so she simply went with one of the templates that came stock in the “Wedding” section. Did she love it? No. Did it make it easy for her to upload photos of her and Todd into a slideshow on the homepage? Yes.
She wasn’t stressed about integrating their registry lists from Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Barneys, and Williams-Sonoma. But what she was worried about was writing “Their Story,” as it was referred to on the site. How could she possibly sum up the last three years of their life in 300 words or less? Hell, she hadn’t done any creative writing since she quit her job.
With a long sip of her stale cold brew and her AirPods secured in her ears, she took a deep breath and simply began typing.
It all started with a date.
This seemed like a good introduction. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss how they met on Hinge, so she thought she’d skip the logistics of how they met and get right into the meat of it.
While it’s untraditional to spend Valentine’s Day with someone you’ve never met before, these two have never fallen into the category of “traditional.”
“Ummmmmm, did I just crush that?” she wondered while re-reading the sentence over and over.
Through thick and thin, they’ve spent the last three years of their lives together — sharing an apartment they now call “home,” a fur baby who goes by Sperry, and an unmatched affinity for one another.
“Wow,” she thought. “I’m better at this than I originally thought. But does ‘thick and thin’ insinuate too much? Like, are people going to wonder why we took a break that one time or are they just going to assume it’s some verbiage that I used off-the-cuff?”
She quickly deleted it before rephrasing it.
Through it all, they’ve spent the last three years of their lives together — sharing an apartment they now call “home,” a fur baby who goes by Sperry, and an unmatched affinity for one another — all before Todd got down on one knee one drizzly night in Paris.
“Okay, okay, that’s better,” she assured herself. “And, like, now everyone — including my parents’ friends who I’m being forced to invite despite not knowing them — know that we got engaged in Paris.” She considered it to be the perfect touch.
And now, they look forward to spending the next countless amount of years together, all beginning with their wedding set in beautiful Aspen.
“Wait, does that sound too tourist-y?” she feared. So she edited further.
With Aspen being the perfect backdrop to exemplify the beautiful love they have for one another, they look forward to spending the next three years and beyond cherishing the moments they’re going to spend with you at their wedding.
Her mouth moved along with her reading of the words, but questions still remained in her head. Was she not explaining their relationship enough? Did including the bits about Paris and Aspen come off too hoity-toity? Was anyone actually going to read this?
Seeing that Todd was on gchat, she sent him the private link to the site to get his input only to see his status go to “offline” just after sending. “Ugh, of fucking course.” .
Respond
Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
@willdefries
@willdefries
defriewf
will@grandex.co
I am campaigning in 2020 to abolish the term “fur baby”
retweet.
that and dog mom are the worst two terms to come out of the basic internet.
This better be made into an actual website for us
Please never refer to me as your “fur baby” again.
I <3 you Sperry.
I am v lovable.
Things Will Does After Graduation: Write NYT Wedding Announcements
The crossover we’ve all been waiting for
Girl has been out of work so long I don’t even remember what she did before lulu lemon
I think she did something in PR? Or marketing? Both?
AHAHAHAH Todd logging off Gchat to avoid Girl is so on brand it hurts.
Unmatched affinity for one another = barely tolerate each other
also meaning I trapped the first guy who walked into my web on Hinge.
affinity is such a sad word to use to describe the love in a marriage, seems accurate
“I am totally in love with the fact that Todd pays my bills.”
I would be interested to hear Caroline and Katie’s view on how the wedding planning is going
Sort of like Chronicles of Todd, but The Bridesmaid Diaries, or something.
Second
I didn’t realize how badly I needed this until now
So Will took the week off.
Nah, stockpiling those days off for Thanksgiving/Christmas.
Why don’t you just write the whole story out then piece it out to us? You can always go back an edit small bits pre publish. Maybe i’m just a finance bro trying to critique creative.
You wouldn’t tell Michelangelo how to paint the sistine chapel, now would you piker?
I retract my comment.
I also wonder what Wills writing process is.
Pretty sure he described for us in the opening paragraph…
Do people actually read the “Our Story” section? Asking for a friend…
Only to see how inaccurate they are
Or how cringingly accurate they are. A buddy of mine actually talked about JDate in his.
Talking about online dating isn’t bad. Saying “He knew it was something special from that first date” when in reality he refused to commit for months is the stuff that makes me laugh.