For the Groom

Grooms - are you feeling left out of the plans for your wedding? Not sure what you are suppose to be doing? Well, wonder no more. A friend of mine sent me the following article which was recently published in The New York Times. I have copied the article for you below. Read and enjoy! Check out the Web sites listed in the article and have fun. Hope this will help you be a more involved groom for your wedding.

A Wedding Plan for Men
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
Published: May 9, 2009
FOR many bridegrooms, planning a wedding is an exercise filled with dread. For others, tasks like creating guest lists, choosing invitations and arranging the perfect honeymoon are part of the fun.
But bridegrooms on either side of the planning aisle have one thing in common: There are few places where men can go for guidance and advice on how and what to contribute to their big day. Wedding books for bridegrooms, like “The Guy’s Guide to Dating, Getting Hitched and Surviving the First Year of Marriage,” by Michael R. Crider, are scarce, and wedding magazines written for men are nonexistent. Clearly the wedding industry is designed to appeal to women.
Sean Palmgren, a 28-year-old research analyst for a marketing firm in Minneapolis, became engaged last June, and immediately began surfing the Internet for ways to help his fiancée, Betsey Krause, plan their wedding in December at a Minneapolis hotel.
“There was nothing out there for guys,” Mr. Palmgren said with a sigh. “Most everything, from magazines to wedding shows, was all about women, but I kept searching.”
Eventually, he found GroomGroove.com, a site for men that tackles such wedding-related topics as knowing if you’re ready to get married, how to pop the question, what are the bridegroom’s and best man’s duties, how to deliver a toast, how to plan a mild bachelor party, and how to plan a wild one.
“The underlying goal is to get marriages started on the right foot,” said Michael Arnot, who founded the site in 2007. “We want grooms to be really sure they are ready to get married, and if they are, to get involved with their wedding, which is a rite of passage. We men pride ourselves in never having to ask for directions. But if there’s one time to do so, this is it.”
Mike Harms, a 39-year-old director of business strategy at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., became engaged to Shannon Truax in October. At first, he said he was “supercynical about marriage.”
“So my first response was to defer to my fiancée for all the planning,” he said. “But as we went along, I realized that I was helping her create a great experience, so I actually began to enjoy it.”
Mr. Harms, whose wedding is scheduled for Dec. 7 at the Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Fla., found information helpful to grooms on mywedding.com, and eventually began posting his own blogs on the site (grumpygroom.com).
“I totally understand that some grooms want nothing to do with their wedding day, but what I try to point out is that some aspects of it can actually be fun,” he said. “Personally, I have been learning through trial and error, but at this point, my responsibilities include putting together the guest list, the honeymoon, even my own bachelor party.”
Amber Haught, 21, a bride-to-be from Lower Burrell, Pa., said her fiancé, Eric Housholder, “has been a part of everything, from the catering to the flowers to my bridesmaid dresses — everything except my wedding dress.”
Ms. Haught, who is to be married June 27, said that all the extra help “is both good and bad.
“Sometimes I look at him and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think of that.’ Other times I look at him and say ‘Are you serious?’ ”
Rob Johnsen, one of four men who founded mywedding.com seven years ago, said that “we are seeing a huge trend in grooms who are getting more involved in their own weddings.”
Mr. Johnsen, 38, whose wedding was last August, pointed out that on his site, there are roughly 100,000 links to “free wedding Web sites,” everything from simple postings to the kind of blogging done by Mr. Harms.
Sixty-five percent of those sites, he said, have been created by men.
“In American culture, weddings have always been all about the bride,” Mr. Johnsen said. “But couples are now getting married later in life and as a result, they are paying for their own weddings, as opposed to having their parents pay. So a groom making this kind of investment is more likely to take a more serious interest in the decision-making process, and that has greatly contributed to the trend.”