I Love My Fiancé, But Getting Married Is Just Too Embarrassing To Go Through With

I’ve been dating my fiancé for three years. We met through work and and I had a crush on him immediately. He was good looking and successful, sure. But he was also kind. And he was smarter than me, something I’d been unsuccessfully looking for in a partner since high school. He proposed very recently and I said yes. Of COURSE I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I love him.

But now he’s getting excited about having a big wedding and I’m not sure how to tell him I am mortified at the thought of people coming to our wedding.

If I have a big wedding, people are going to think I care about weddings. They won’t see me as the competent, intelligent, strong woman I have worked hard to become, they’ll see me as someone who had an honest conversation with someone about which color a napkin should be. That is really, really, really embarrassing. What if my coworkers come? Or my boss? How will they not think less of me?

Of course, the biggest obstacle in this whole mental debate I’m having is that my fiancé doesn’t see this. For him, the wedding is a big day that he’ll do some work on, but mostly I’m in charge of planning, because I’m the woman. When his friends and family show up, they’ll assume I did all the planning. No one would be so absurd as to think HE spent a bunch of afternoons not spending extra hours in the office, not working out and improving his health, but stuffing dried flowers and doilies together until they turn into something you put on the table for old ladies to gush over.

I’m not this person.

I’m not just a girl who’s spent her whole life planning a wedding, I’ve actually worked very hard to accomplish things that set me apart from this image of what a woman is. It feels like a joke to have finally found the love of my life and have to give up and let myself be associated with that nothing-better-to-do image of women that most people have. I’m really struggling with letting go of my image, and I have no idea how to tell him. It has nothing to do with my love for him or doubts about wanting to be married.

I wish we could just fast forward to next year and have already been married for a number of months. I don’t know how I’m going to go through with this.