Getting married is a big deal and you need to be sure that you can make a marriage last before committing to one. For that reason, I thought it would be negligent of me to not do an astrological compatibility match on Nicole and I before we tie the knot.
There is a lot of websites that will do your astrological compatibility automatically for you. I'll have to admit, some of it seems made up. But, you can't argue with the stars, and I'm not one to question someone who is in touch with the universe.
I did a whole bunch of analyses on Nicole & I using various websites and I'll be honest: It doesn't look good for us. Follow me on this journey as I explain what the stars say about our relationship.
Famous Gemini-Scorpio Couple: Baa Rafaeli and Leonardo DiCaprio
So we're off to a bad start already. “Baa” isn't even a real name. It is the sound that a sheep makes when it is happy. “Baa baa, this grass is wonderful”, says the sheep. You don't date an expression of happiness, even if you're Leonardo DiCaprio.
There are about five people present in this relationship. It’s a box inside an enigma inside a mystery. The trouble is that it’s hard to catch everybody at home at the same time. It’s definitely a costume party, which remains a party as long as no one has to take their mask off.
I'll tell you what the enigma is, this bloody paragraph. Five people present in the relationship, but never home at the same time? So, one day I am “rockstar” Chris and come home and complain to Nicole about how the hit TV program “The Voice” isn't real music and I learned how to sing the old fashioned way. But she's currently “Boris Yelsten” Nicole and is doing vodka shots off the kitchen counter singing Russian drinking songs.
But of course, it's a costume party so we're bloody loving it. We get home from work, dress up, then get the box out of the enigma and open it. Inside is a mystery which really pisses us off because the box looked like a pizza box and we're hungry after a hard day.
Meanwhile our neighbours think we are crazy because the other three personalities have arrived home unexpectedly, all three of which think they are Macauly Culkin and start fighting over the aftershave in the bathroom.
How to Attract to a Gemini Woman as a Scorpio Man: Have you ever tried to squish an ant at a picnic? You know the way you have to chase it with your eyes and hands at the same time? Long periods of intense waiting and watching must be followed by deft acts and deeds. This lady, one of the most desirable in the zodiac, is as hard to pin down as quicksilver, her mercurial ruler, which is exactly what you need to lighten you up in the right way.
Ants are one of the easiest animals to kill. You probably kill a couple of hundred a day by accident. You don't really have to chase ants at all. You see one, you kill it. There isn't really any long, intense periods of waiting in the hunt for ants.
Nicole certainly is a desirable lady, but her mercurial ruler (quicksilver) wasn’t enough to stop me from tracking her down for dates after we first met. Also, I am not so sure that that quicksilver will light me up in the right way - exposure to liquid mercury is extremely toxic for humans. My quick and painful demise will surely be devastating for the relationship!
How to Attract a Scorpio Man as a Gemini Woman: There is something about you like a worm on the end of a hook that lures the big fish. Scorpio, being a deep creature, is utterly fascinated by your superficiality and allure. The more mercurial you can be, the better, even to the point of being purposely irresponsible about small and inconsequential things – be a little bit late, be hard to catch on the phone, say “I’ll get back to you” a lot, be willing to disappear.
Again we emphasise being mercurial. I looked this up for clarity and it means “subject to sudden or unpredictable changes”. If we had been on a date and Nicole suddenly said “I feel like a swim” and jumped in the harbour in her dress, I think this would be a sudden or unpredictable thing to do. But the reading says, "the more mercurial the better", so this might mean going to painstaking measures to confuse me. Constantly demanding to be referred to by different names, speaking different languages around the home, and randomly, and repeatedly breaking the things which I thought she liked.
If Nicole came home tonight and smashed all our serving trays and bowls in our house and then said "I think we have too many plates and glasses in this house", that would really be unpredictable for me.
Progression of Relationship: You know how you stare at the chess board at the beginning of the game trying to figure out what your strategy is? Figure two people doing that at the same time and then changing their strategy in response to the other person’s every move. The possibility of mind games is absolutely boggling and this may take the place of an erotic connection.
Most people who get married expect to live a calm and peaceful life, in love with each other, starting a family and just enjoying each other’s company. Not us. Every thing Nicole says to me will be taken into account in my strategy to ultimately control her mind. If Nicole mentions something about her day at school, I will assume this is an attempt to one-up me and I will say "school is for suckers" and demand that we play chess.
Nicole is no fool though, and, developing a strategy of her own, will feed me me false information and continue to be unpredictable around the home, ripping up the carpet and using it as a dress, something which I, as a scorpio, would find very alluring.
Degree of Marriage: This couple has the downside of sticking together through thick and thin to the point of real pain and absurdity. There may be a constant diet of betrayal, painful and unnecessary confrontations, ridicule, sarcasm, and vendetta, and yet the relationship endures. This is not the best recipe for mental health.
Picture Nicole and I, 10 years from now. Nicole is mentally deranged from being Boris Yelsin and 2xMacauly Culkin for so long. Her mecurial ruler orders her to play hard to get on the phone and say “I'll get back to you” a lot. I've become so absurd that I have ceased to be a person and have become a biscuit, probably an iced vovo, and spend all my time in the kitchen cupboard. Nicole, annoyed at this, starts unnecessarily confronting and ridiculing me like “why did you leave crumbs all over the kitchen, Arrowroot”, knowing full well that I'm far more tasty than that and that crumbing is just part of being a biscuit.
Sex: For the restless mind, sex can be an outlet for ingenuity and cleverness. When you combine a restless mind with a subterranean urge to discover the deepest, darkest motives in order to control the other person, you have a very interesting range of experiences being worked out through sexuality.
Ingenuity and cleverness are not the first things I think of when it comes to sex between a husband and wife. I suppose if I was, one day, brooding at home on my deepest and darkest motives to control Nicole, I might use my ingenuity to construct a mind control device to help me initiate sex and win our continued mind games.
Nicole, sensing this and never wanting to miss a chance to adapt her strategy to one-up me, develops a counter-mind control device, a sledge hammer, and burst home through the doors, smashing my mind control device into a million pieces. I’m bloody loving it because Nicole is being unpredictable again, which is alluring to me as a scorpio.
In a frenzy of excitement and absudity, I will exclaim, Jurrasic Park style, “Clever Girl”.
Our Rating: 6/10
Although our star signs point to an unpredictable future and an inevitable demise into the land of poor mental health and mercury poisoning, I’m still excited about the prospects of this relationship. Our unfailing desire to one-up each other, Nicole's constant aloofness and unpredictability and my ingenuity in the bedroom are a fiery combination which is sure to conjure up the passion required to sustain a marriage. When we're not unecessarily confronting an ridiculing each other, or playing hard to get, there will be long periods of chess-style strategic moves, making sure one of us is always ahead of the other and our mental health steadily declines.
Let's face it, one of the best ways to impress people is with a wedding. This is your special moment to show everyone in your life your style, fashion persona and impressive lifestyle. No expense should be spared. It is your special day and the wedding must reflect that. It isn't enough that people leave your wedding feeling impressed by you, they should leave feeling worse about themselves.
With this in mind, I thought that I would construct a little guide on how to plan the ultimate wedding.
Let's start with the basics
Get a wedding planner then fire them immediately after they make their first suggestion. No one tells you what to do at your wedding. Only you know you and only you can plan the right wedding, for you. It is important that everyone at the wedding gets a sense of your sense of style, not some 2 bit wedding planner's.
Now that you're in charge, you need to pick the ultimate location for the wedding. And what do we know about ultimate locations? They're hard to get to. Your wedding needs to be located somewhere so remote that people need weeks or months of planning in order to attend. People need either a passport, an injection, or preferably both in order to be able to attend your wedding. People will need to take at least a week off work in order to attend and ideally, no one will have heard of your wedding location prior to receiving the invitation.
Pictured: Bombadirious
Speaking of invitations, you need to redefine what it means for people to be invited to something. There needs to be at least 6 forms of correspondence sent before the wedding and 3 afterwards:
Before:
- Announcing the engagement
- Engagement party invitation
- Engagement party attendance thank you letter
- Save the date card
- Wedding invitation
- Wedding invitation reminder and details card
After:
- Post-wedding thank you card
- CD-ROM of the wedding photos and DVD of the wedding videos
- Postcards from your ultimate honeymoon
Every form of communication which is sent must have your colour theme (ours is lavender) and be printed on the highest quality linen. If your invites are not made or something other than paper/cardboard then you are not trying and this will not impress people.
Gift registry
Think big. No one is impressed by someone who doesn't own a toaster yet. The gift registry is your chance to show people that you have style not just in terms of your wedding, but in everyday life too. Some ideas:
- 10,000-20,000 thread Egyptian cotton bed linen
- Plane tickets (no Jetstar please!)
- Titanium Belgian waffle maker
- Horse insurance (yes we own a horse!!)
The dress
Your wedding dress should be so couture that no one even knows it is a wedding dress. People should be so confused by what you are wearing that they are impressed and in awe of you. As a guide for cost, the dress should cost the equivalent of one weeks' groceries per square inch of the dress. Do not refer to your wedding dress without using words such as "bespoke", "designer", "couture" or "custom".
Getting there
Your wedding cars should be as old as possible. There is nothing more impressive at a wedding than old cars. And the older the car, the more people will be impressed:
From the 1960s….no, been there, done that.
From the 1950s….no, too common.
From the 1940s….no, you don't want people to think you are poor.
From the 1930s….reasonable I suppose, but this is your special day!
1920s and earlier….now we're talking!
The reception
There needs to be little wheelbarrows with flowers in them: everywhere. I can't emphasise this enough. Little wheelbarrows impress people! Do not pay less than $100 for a wheelbarrow with flowers in it. They say you get what you pay for, and this is the case more than ever when it comes to tiny wheelbarrows.
Chair covers are important too. When most people think of chair covers they think of spending $50-100 per chair. Kind of embarrassing, right? Your chairs need to be decorated so well that people are not even aware that they are chairs. Make sure the staff running the wedding are aware that no guest is to see a chair directly, they must be covered at all times.
You must take dance lessons
Dancing just plain impresses people, especially if it is choreographed. Your first dance should be so well rehearsed that people think it is a flash-mob type scenario. Do not settle for the traditional waltz. This is the kind of thing people from the Western Suburbs do at their weddings. Your dance should be a cross between that YouTube video that everyone likes and Beyonce's hit "Single Ladies" film clip.
To be continued
It wasn't until I started writing this that I realised how much I have to give in terms of wedding planning knowledge. In the next part of this series I will cover: wedding bands, the honeymoon, speeches, customs and much more.
When I’m at Boost Juice and I place my order, they ask me what kind of juice I would like. My answer is always, “whichever one has watermelon in it”. I love watermelon. It reminds me of summers where it didn’t rain enough to flood the Warragamba dam and all of Forbes. My juice preference is discrete, and well-rehearsed.
When people ask me what kind of wedding I am having, my answer is far less rehearsed. How can you have a kind of wedding? That’s like asking someone what kind of child they are going to have. It’s rude. And people who are prone to having red-headed children are especially offended.
I’ll admit at this point that I am a regular viewer of Four Weddings. For those who don’t know what that means, it is a show where four women desperate for attention invite each other to their respective weddings and rate each other on: theme, food, dress and overall experience.
These women have kinds of weddings. They all have a theme. Stuff like: simple-elegant, princess, Christmas (wtf?) and many others.
So as much as I feign ignorance, I do know what people mean when they ask me what kind of wedding we are having. So, I thought I’d have a quick look at some wedding traditions from around the world to see which kind of wedding would suit us.
I’ll halt at this point and say that my knowledge of the wedding practices of the world is limited to the information provided on Wikipedia. So if I offend anyone, please realise I do so in an attempt at humour.
Let me highlight first some of the traditions which are commonplace at a Jewish wedding:
The couple is married under a wedding canopy (chuppah), signifying their new home together.
![beach wedding chuppah[4].jpeg](http://c940564.r64.cf2.rackcdn.com/0-1332155770520603/4773207dbbbba9ffe0d525dddb7ec2a8.jpg "beach wedding chuppah[4].jpeg")
This is nice, but stupid. We are not going to live under a canopy and symbolism doesn’t help you when you are out in the rain. The Jewish people really need to work on this one.
Seven blessings are recited, blessing the bride and groom and their new home.
Too many blessings! Look, God is busy. I would ask him for one blessing, e.g. “don’t kill us”. Other than that we will sort ourselves out. I know how to do the groceries now. Nicole is great at washing. We don’t need blessings in the domestic sense. Give us some kids too, but we don’t need a blessing for that. If the girls from 16 & pregnant can do it, so can we!
The couple sip from a glass of wine.
Fantastic! +1 for the Jews on this one.
In Orthodox weddings, the groom then says:
"If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.”
This is where I’ll declare ignorance. I’ll renounce the skills of my right hand if necessary, but God had really better be sure that I won’t need them during marriage!
Alright, so maybe a Jewish wedding isn't for us. So, how about Hindu weddings then?
Hindu ceremonies are usually conducted totally or at least partially in Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu scriptures.
This will totally not work for our guests. Most of them are English speakers and the rest speak German. This would not only be inconsiderate to our guests but also difficult for Father Stephen from Newcastle to do.
The wedding celebrations may last for several days and they can be extremely diverse.
You know what? This isn’t enough for me. I’ll be celebrating our wedding for the rest of our lives! I don’t think the Hindus take weddings seriously enough for my liking!
The most important step is saptapadi or saat phere, wherein the bride and the groom, hand-in-hand, encircle the sacred fire seven times, each circle representing a matrimonial vow.
Not good enough mate! First of all. How big is this fire if we are able to encircle it? Where I’m from Dad wouldn’t even call that a fire! There will probably be a fire ban on up in Maitland when we have our wedding anyway!
I think the Muslims get it a little bit closer to what I’m after. They say that the husband and wife act as each other’s protector and comforter and therefore are only meant for one another. That is sweet. It is like a Bryan Adams song. Polyamory is normally cited as a feature of Islamist marriage, however, this is only under restrictions (usually to do with supporting a relation in need), rather than exciting sexual reasons!
Given our background, we will probably end up going down the traditional Catholic route. God will be really happy about that, and Wikipedia reminds me that he plays a big part in Christian ceremonies. The one feature I love about Catholic weddings is this:
The Roman Catholic Church believes that marriage is a sacrament and a valid marriage between two baptized persons cannot be broken by any other means than death.
I think there is something special in that. Nicole has to stay married to me, or kill me. This gives me certain graces when it comes to ‘going out with the boys’, hiding dirty dishes in the cupboard, or throwing out important items of her clothing. Because Nicole’s unlikely to kill me for those things, her only option is divorce, and if she chooses that one – God’s on my side!
I've been married once before. In kindergarten, a bully forced me and girl from my grade to first kiss and then get married under the fort at our school. It didn't really bother me since I liked the girl anyway, but it seems like the kind of thing I should probably tell my new fiancee. I sincerely doubt the boy was an consecrated priest though, and even if he was, I doubt he would get much repeat business when he beat up the bride and groom shortly after the wedding.
Although my school wedding didn't work out, I now have a new fiancee who I actually want to marry. I met her in an unusual way which is the best way to meet girls you want to marry. The thing about girls is, they like to meet men they want to marry in the most spontaneous and unplanned ways. For example, man saves woman from duck attack in Central Park in New York, they get chatting about how you don't expect ducks to be violent but they really are and how bad the coffee is in America and BAM!: perfect meeting story.
Pictured: violent duck
The poetic reversal of this is that when it comes to planning their wedding, women like to plan every little detail from what the 'colour scheme' of the wedding is, right down to the type of glitter to put on the tables and buying spare undies for the bridesmaids (I read this on i-do.com.au. I am not sure if people naturally assume their bridesmaids will be getting themselves into situations where they need fresh undies, but it amuses me that it happens frequently enough for them to include it on the list).
I think only three things really need to be considered when planning a wedding: who to invite, where is it on, and is the bride happy?
Of course, this is being a little naive because I don't want the night to be a complete shambles. A wedding is special and must be treated as such. I trust my fiancee to plan all the important details; with the amount of magazines she has to pick things from and the amount of friends who are excited about the planning, I trust that nothing will be missed.
But I feel like no wife will respect their husband if they have not played a role when it comes to the organisation of the wedding. So in the interests of clarity I have compiled a list of my "non-negotiables" when it comes to our forthcoming wedding.
The rules are:
- No use of the expression 'partners' to describe the bride and groom.
- No dancing.
- Wedding invitations not to have any form of fabric/twigs/leaves/etc attached to them.
- The song "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News must be played at the start and end of the wedding.
- No vegans.
- Wedding dress must be white, grey or brown.
- No extended metaphors are to be used in wedding speeches.
By imposing these rules I hope to give my "special touch" to the wedding and show that I really do care about it being our special day, one that can be remembered and enjoyed by ourselves and our families.
