Recently, my fiancé Mike and I had to make the difficult decision to postpone our wedding due to COVID restrictions, something brides and grooms today are all too familiar with. We planned to have our wedding on June 11, 2021 and now have pushed it back to September 17, 2021 in the hopes that COVID might read the room a little and make an exit. The two of us reacted to this change in very different ways: One of us cried and asked the other (dramatically through tears) if we could please get a dog to help cope with the trauma, and the other just began updating the eight million spreadsheets they had created for the wedding. After reading this, maybe you’ll be able to figure out who was who in that situation.

I think the saying “opposites attract” applies pretty well to Mike and me. Mike needs to have everything planned out, organized, neat and tidy and he does things WAY in advanced. I, on the other hand, live my life by the wise words my brother once told me when I was a freshman in college and he was a senior in college-both of us at the University of Dayton. Those words were “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.” (He told me this when I was trying to decide between going to a party and finishing a paper I had due the next morning….I won’t say what I did, but I will say I still got the paper done.) I don’t plan things out, my organizational skills need work and I procrastinate a bit on things in my life. Mike is a realist and I am an optimist. I love Dunkin’ coffee and he prefers Starbucks. Mike is a numbers and data guy and I am more of a “Where are the pretty pictures? These numbers and text on this page are boring me” type person. Mike likes to research and read reviews of things before making a purchase, I am more of an impulse shopper/buyer. When it came to planning our wedding and choosing different vendors, we had two different approaches. Mike liked to call various companies and compare prices. I value my time and “Go with my gut” when choosing things. A few months ago, when we were trying to find a hotel for our wedding guests, I told Mike that I’d take on the task of finding a hotel and blocking rooms for our out of town guest to stay. Being the planner that he is, Mike took the lead with a lot of our wedding planning, which was TOTALLY fine with me, but I thought I’d offer some assistance on this. Guess I was feeling extra generous that day or something. “Hmmm I don’t know Kath,” Mike said. “I appreciate the offer but I’d like to actually price out hotels and if you do it you’re going to call the first hotel you Google, come back to me and say excitedly, ‘So! I called this place and the guy on the phone sounded really nice! So I think I’m going to go with them!’ and I don’t want to have to tell you no.” I just laughed because his impression of me was spot on and I would have 100% done that.

In addition to our different personalities, Mike and I grew up differently. Mike is the oldest and has one brother, I am the fourth of five children (Middle child survivor). His family used coasters and my family did not. (Our coasters were the constant layer of dust on side tables-nature’s coaster). My family bought in bulk (and yet fed us as if it was still the Great Depression and food rations were still a thing) and his didn’t. Mike’s parents bought him proper athletic gear for sports, whereas my parents knew they’d be wasting money on me and made me use hand-me-downs from my older siblings or just said “I’m not buying you those expensive foo-foo soccer shoes you’ll use for a month and then I’ll be tripping over them in the basement for the rest of the year!” (direct quote from my Dad). Mike was allowed to have any type of pop-tart he wanted for breakfast-Oreo, chocolate, s’more you name it! Whereas in our family we could only have the brown sugar ones or strawberry because those were the “healthy” pop-tarts. (He still brags about this.)

This difference in upbringing has led to some interesting experiences and conversations in our relationship, including “the great pickle jar debate of 2019” when I picked out a pickle jar that was apparently “Gigantic” according to Mike. (I thought it was a normal size). And he thought it was pretty funny when I told him that when I was little and played soccer, whenever the referee would line everyone up to check and make sure everyone had proper shin-guards and spikes on before the game, as soon as everyone would turn to show their fancy soccer spikes I would bend down and pretend I was tying my shoe because I didn’t have any. This was just common practice for me growing up.

Not all our conversations are ridiculous ones though. We definitely had some important conversations before deciding we were going to spend the rest of our lives together:

• We discussed how we would never EVER go camping-we are NOT “outdoor people”-I have no tolerance for cold weather and we don’t like to get our shoes/clothes dirty.
• We discussed how we will never let our future children play a musical instrument because neither of us are musically talented so we DO NOT want to have to sit and listen to them practice in our home. Or worse-have to attend some sort of concert or recital they may be in. Exception to the rule would be if they had some sort of headphone plugged into the instrument so we wouldn’t have to suffer. If our children have to play the recorder at school I may even have to try and get a doctor’s note to excuse them from bringing that noise gun home. We don’t want that in our home.
• We will NEVER EVER go to Disney World-crowds, long lines, many of the characters creep me out, the hot sun-talk about our NIGHTMARE! Plus we don’t like rollercoasters. They are too “jolting” for me and Mike just doesn’t like them.

But I think one of the most important conversations came after we purchased a home together (home purchase ordeal will have to be a whole other blog post). We were driving back to our house and Mike said to me, “Kath, I have a very serious question to ask you, and I hope I know your answer but I need your full attention.” I paused the music, turned to him and said, “Ok, I’m ready.” I could tell Mike was a bit nervous and struggled to find the words, but he finally said, “Would you ever want to host a garage sale at our new home?” I grabbed his hand and said, “Michael, absolutely not! Do you not know me at all?” “Thank GOD!” He said relieved” But I continued. “Do you know how much work garage sales are? All the PLANNING that goes into them? Can you really see me organizing a garage sale? Pricing everything out, sorting through things. Ugh! I’m getting anxious just thinking about it!” “Yea you would never do that I don’t know what I was thinking,” Mike said. I continued on my rant: “And THEN after all that AWFUL sorting you have to sit there in the hot sun on a WEEKEND while people come look at our junk? You think I’d give up a weekend for that?” “But what if it turns out our block does one of those big garage sales where every house on the street does a sale?” Mike asked. “Well,” I said with a sigh, “We’d have no other choice but to sell the house I guess.”

Despite all our differences, Mike and I are very much the same. We are both old souls. We love our Dateline and murder shows. We both love Propel and automatically rate a restaurant higher if they have bread on the the table. The two of us have the most random conversations all the time and we share in the same sense of humor. We value and appreciate our differences but also make fun of each other for them, and that is what I think makes us the perfect match. Together, we always have fun and always have a lot of laughs-usually at the other’s expense. As hard as it’s been trying to plan a wedding during COVID, it’s been 100 times easier with my lifelong best friend, Mike. (Talking about my fiancé Mike here, I feel like I need to clarify since I have a lot of family members named Mike. Also, just saying, things may have been 200 times easier with Mike AND a dog, but who will ever know because no one loves me and won’t buy me a dog) While we we were crushed to have to postpone our wedding from our original date of June 11th to September 17th, we’re hopeful that the COVID cloud will not be raining on our wedding plans anymore. But if it does, I know that together, we’ll weather the storm.