Scott Green

It takes a lot of work to get married:  selecting a venue; whittling the guest list; designing the invitations; receiving gifts.

I never thought getting presents would be so difficult.  I assumed I’d just send my fiancée, Michelle, to a couple of showers and she’d come home with gifts we could enjoy as a couple, like season tickets.

But as it turns out, it’s hard work.  The problem is, you can’t let your guests buy whatever they feel like because they might choose finger towels in the wrong shade of lavender, if you could imagine.  You have to register, which means the bride and groom make a list of what they’d like until they’re so mad at each other the wedding is called off.  This really simplifies things for your guests.

Michelle and I have spent a couple days registering, and considering we’ve been deciding what things people are going to have to buy us, it hasn’t been fun.  The main problem is that Michelle has a strong sense of exactly what she’d like to receive, whereas I have a very strong sense of wanting to go home and watch the NFL playoffs.

So what happens is, we’ll be looking at duvet covers, which takes a long time because Michelle has to look at every duvet cover ever made.  (For the guys out there, a duvet is essentially a comforter or bedspread, which I didn’t know until this relationship.)  This is a very big deal to women, who subscribe to Duvet Digest and read all the top duvet blogs.  After a little while she’ll ask me what I think.

This means trouble because I have never, for one moment in my life, had a thought about a duvet.  Michelle knows this because when she started dating me, I had a bedspread festooned with my college’s cartoony mascot.  Without my mother’s intervention, I’d still be using my old Sesame Street duvet.

Which leaves me with three choices.  I can tell Michelle which of the duvets I like slightly better than the others.  This is a bad choice because my opinion is wrong.  Michelle only asks which one I like after she knows which one she likes, and she has detailed reasons why her duvet is superior, such as color, softness, heft, cost, design, number of cup holders, etc.  Whereas my reason for the duvet I picked is that it was the first one I saw.

My second option is to tell her the honest truth, which is that I don’t care what duvet we get so long as we select it during the current century.  But then I get in trouble for not caring enough.  This is why I chose the third route, writing a humor column making light of the situation, because it doesn’t matter what duvet we get once I’m banished to the couch.

And that’s just duvets.  For the rest of the bed we have to pick sheets, pillow cases, pillows, decorative pillows, throw pillows, and disinfectant for Michelle to spray on my side after I get up.  We’re also registered for stuff for our bathroom, living room, kitchen and dining room.  We don’t have room for any of it in our current apartment.

But we did the hard work of choosing what we want, so now the world must go out and buy it for us.  Together we created registries at Bloomingdale’s and Bed Bath & Beyond, Michelle made one for us at Crate & Barrel, and I registered us at StubHub.

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