Wednesday Wedding Tips: Need A Bouncer?

Security at a wedding. Now, I understand it if you are a royal family member and are in line to inherit the throne… there may be people who want to disrupt that day, so it makes sense that they would have a lot of security. I will even give you the benefit of the doubt if you are big celebrity… they have crazy stalkers and have to deal with paparazzi. But for the rest of us normal people (or the 99% if we want to go with the whole Occupy protests of the moment) I don’t think security is an item to cross off on every bride’s to-do list. However, apparently even I can be wrong at times (trust me, it is a rare occurrence).

So, one of my friends (who shall remain nameless) works at a facility that occasionally hosts weddings, and she emails me one day to say she just met with a bride and one of the items on the list to discuss for the event prep was wedding security. Needless to say, I was intrigued. In all the weddings I had been involved in over the years or asked advice about, SECURITY is never a topic that had come up. Was this person someone famous? Was there a chance of paparazzi descending on her place of work? Nope. Nothing so entertaining, in fact the answer was very depressing, the security was to prevent the bride’s mother from attending the event.

Security to prevent your mother from attending your wedding? Apparently, the bride and mother did not have a good relationship and it had been made very clear that she was not welcome, but the mother was threatening to show up anyway. Wow. I know I have family drama and my Mom and I have major issues, but I can’t imagine that even with all of our drama I wouldn’t want her at a day that would matter so much. I also realize that we all have our own issues in our relationships and I have no clue what the circumstances were behind this issue. This helps get me to my point though… it seems that weddings often become about everyone else at times… the parents, the grandparents, the siblings, the party… all of the players. Even the WEDDING itself seems to become a bigger deal at times than what the wedding represents…  two people committing themselves to each other in a marriage. When you have to have security present to get to that, it makes me wonder if that takes away from what the point of that event should be about?

I don’t actually have an answer to that, but my advice for this week when it comes to weddings: always be prepared to expect the unexpected. You never know what may pop up, and if you are friend helping someone with their wedding (which I feel I am an expert at by now) be prepared to be supportive in the planning and hard decision making process, like if they have to bar someone from a wedding. Actually, now that I think about it, I did play bouncer during a point of a wedding day. So I guess I have done security before. Huh. I wonder if I can put that on my résumé?