Or at least everyone you think might actually pay attention to you.
It’s strange but this rather strange and vain filled post about shopping for an engagement ring made me realize that all of us males, for some strange reason, are bred with a specific competitiveness to not just keep up with the Jones – we want to blow them out of the water. It’s like we were never satified with merely beating our brother at Battleship – we had to do it without losing a ship and while robbing the Monopoly bank at the same time. Where that Wedding Bee poster talks about her fiancee’s connoisseurship, it’s really less about being a Or at least everyone you think might actually pay attention to you.
It’s strange but this rather strange and vain filled post about shopping for an engagement ring made me realize that all of us males, for some strange reason, are bred with a specific competitiveness to not just keep up with the Jones – we want to blow them out of the water. It’s like we were never satified with merely beating our brother at Battleship – we had to do it without losing a ship and while robbing the Monopoly bank at the same time. Where that Wedding Bee poster talks about her fiancee’s connoisseurship, it’s really less about being a connoisseur but more a competitive nature where even external praise is stiffled unless the ring passes some sort of bizzare internal scorecard that doesn’t reflect reality. It doesn’t matter if the ring is eye clean – what matters is that this fellow knows that under any specific otherworldly measurement, the ring passes with flying colors. I doubt they’ll ever run in the circles where that ring will be socially inspective at a party by a Jeweler but, in this guy’s mind, if that ever happened, if the jeweler ever hesitated in praise, this fiancee has failed. This is a perfectionism that lives in a faux world of confidence – and it’s one that, for some reason, all guys share. And if they don’t, they’re lying and merely living their life as a reaction against this quasi perfection. A guy living in sweatpants knows that he’s living in sweat pants and he might try to pretend that he doesn’t care about how he looks. But he knows, and he’s aware, and he knows when he’s somehow outclassed by another individual.
Which leads me to weddings and why, for some reason, the wedding culture in the US cares so much about this fake internal competitive scorecard rather than striving for an eye-clean wedding. Does stiving for perfection let vendors charge more? Yes. Does striving for “connoisseurship” lead to inflated egos? Yes. Is all of this, in general, rather bogus and unhealthy? Yes.
It’s hard to not look at wedding magazines, blogs, and communities and not realize that we all strive to rob the bank while playing Scrabble. We care less about the game that is being played and more about dominating every game that’s ever been played. It reminds me of a story about some villages where the laws were recently changed so that families would stop indebiting themselves to the point of ruin to throw a week long festival for the marriage of their sons and daughters. If they try to throw a huge party, they could go to jail. Even in places where the families lived on extremely low incomes, they had to one up their neighbors. The concept of eye-clean doesn’t exist. Go big or die trying. This works when you’re in a war but when you’re just getting married? Yeah, the logic doesn’t work so much.
So the trick is to stay eye-clean. It doesn’t mean you can’t aim for good – it means that you stop trying to aim for only perfection. And to do that, takes a certain amount of self-knowledge, research, and focus. The couple in that Wedding Bee post wasted months doing ineffective research in the search of “perfection”. She didn’t look at enough real diamonds to understand, until much later, what her choosen cut needs to be “perfect” and the fiancee let his connoisseurship blind himself to develop ineffective standards that damaged their definition of eye-clean. Did they end up with the right diamond for her? Yes. But could they have done it smarter and more effective? I think so. And my evidence for that is that if they had, she wouldn’t have admitted in “horror” of almost settling for a diamond “from a chain retail store”. Or blame her fiancee for having the audacity to have her help pick the ring.
And why does keeping things eye-clean matter to me when I already have the ring? Well, like that guy, I also consider myself a connoisseur of certain things – and that’s tasty cakes. And trying to figure out how to successfully feed 250 people on our budget while making the desserts spectacular even though I know I won’t get to taste any of them because I’ll be too busy walking the floor and saying hi to my guests, is probably the thing that’s taking up my mind at the moment. Honeymoon? Photographer? That means nothing to me until I get the food exactly right. But I gotta keep it eye clean. Eye clean, eye clean, eye clean. If I don’t, I’ll go mad. but more a competitive nature where even external praise is stiffled unless the ring passes some sort of bizzare internal scorecard that doesn’t reflect reality. It doesn’t matter if the ring is eye clean – what matters is that this fellow knows that under any specific otherworldly measurement, the ring passes with flying colors. I doubt they’ll ever run in the circles where that ring will be socially inspective at a party by a Jeweler but, in this guy’s mind, if that ever happened, if the jeweler ever hesitated in praise, this fiancee has failed. This is a perfectionism that lives in a faux world of confidence – and it’s one that, for some reason, all guys share. And if they don’t, they’re lying and merely living their life as a reaction against this quasi perfection. A guy living in sweatpants knows that he’s living in sweat pants and he might try to pretend that he doesn’t care about how he looks. But he knows, and he’s aware, and he knows when he’s somehow outclassed by another individual.
Which leads me to weddings and why, for some reason, the wedding culture in the US cares so much about this fake internal competitive scorecard rather than striving for an eye-clean wedding. Does stiving for perfection let vendors charge more? Yes. Does striving for “connoisseurship” lead to inflated egos? Yes. Is all of this, in general, rather bogus and unhealthy? Yes.
It’s hard to not look at wedding magazines, blogs, and communities and not realize that we all strive to rob the bank while playing Scrabble. We care less about the game that is being played and more about dominating every game that’s ever been played. It reminds me of a story about some villages where the laws were recently changed so that families would stop indebiting themselves to the point of ruin to throw a week long festival for the marriage of their sons and daughters. If they try to throw a huge party, they could go to jail. Even in places where the families lived on extremely low incomes, they had to one up their neighbors. The concept of eye-clean doesn’t exist. Go big or die trying. This works when you’re in a war but when you’re just getting married? Yeah, the logic doesn’t work so much.
So the trick is to stay eye-clean. It doesn’t mean you can’t aim for good – it means that you stop trying to aim for only perfection. And to do that, takes a certain amount of self-knowledge, research, and focus. The couple in that Wedding Bee post wasted months doing ineffective research in the search of “perfection”. She didn’t look at enough real diamonds to understand, until much later, what her choosen cut needs to be “perfect” and the fiancee let his connoisseurship blind himself to develop ineffective standards that damaged their definition of eye-clean. Did they end up with the right diamond for her? Yes. But could they have done it smarter and more effective? I think so. And my evidence for that is that if they had, she wouldn’t have admitted in “horror” of almost settling for a diamond “from a chain retail store”. Or blame her fiancee for having the audacity to have her help pick the ring.
And why does keeping things eye-clean matter to me when I already have the ring? Well, like that guy, I also consider myself a connoisseur of certain things – and that’s tasty cakes. And trying to figure out how to successfully feed 250 people on our budget while making the desserts spectacular even though I know I won’t get to taste any of them because I’ll be too busy walking the floor and saying hi to my guests, is probably the thing that’s taking up my mind at the moment. Honeymoon? Photographer? That means nothing to me until I get the food exactly right. But I gotta keep it eye clean. Eye clean, eye clean, eye clean. If I don’t, I’ll go mad.