Let’s face it, weddings are difficult to plan at the best of times. The flowers, the food, choosing a DJ can all cause headaches. But what if the groom’s family and the bride’s family don’t get along? Even worse, what if the groom’s family comes from a species of reptile that died 65 million years ago, and the bride’s family comes from a type of space rock that caused that extinction? That is a recipe for a perfect nuptial nightmare.
But a wedding with both dinosaurs and meteors in attendance doesn’t necessarily have to develop into a fiasco. With clear communication and a few helpful tips, the wedding can proceed with grace and dignity.
1) Talk beforehand
As you probably already know, a romance between a dinosaur and a meteor can stir up a lot of tension based on historic problems between dinosaurs and meteors. Donna, a beautiful 26-year old parasaurolophus, had to deal with a father who initially refused to look at her meteorite fiancé, let alone offer his daughter to him at the altar. “I was really worried about what my dad was going to do at the wedding. But I sat down with him and explained to him, with bellowing calls produced through my long nasal passages, that even though Brad has a solid iron core instead of a heart, I loved that iron core with all my being. When my father saw how important the wedding was to me, he was totally cool with it! Later I even found him tearing it up on the dance floor with some asteroids at the reception!”
2) Diversify the wedding party
It can be tempting to keep your bridal party to the 3 other pieces of cosmic debris that you first entered the earth’s atmosphere with during the vernal equinox, but you should heavily consider bringing in some people from the other side of the family when putting together your wedding party. Carol, a meteor from the Kuiper Belt that landed in upstate New York, asked her future sister-in-law Audrey, an ankylosaur, to join her bridal party. “Not only did it show both our families that we were a united front,” says Carol, “but it turned out Audrey knew the best place for pole-dancing lessons for the bachelorette! Thanks to Audrey, we all had a great time and learned a lot in the process.”
3) Be careful with the speeches
Later in the night, everyone has had a few drinks and there is a good chance that someone might say something they regret. Rachel, an Edmontosaurus, tells the story of how, at her wedding, a tipsy meteorite made a few well-meaning but insensitive jokes during his speech, and it was met with stony silence by the dinosaur side of the reception hall. “He was going on and on about how the meteors lost a family member too that day,” explained Rachel. “I was mortified. It nearly ruined the wedding for me.” It is key to carefully curate who is going to be making speeches and to talk with the speakers beforehand to let them know that any references to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event are not acceptable. Tell them to keep it light, and focus on the love that binds the couple together! That’s why everyone is there at the wedding!
4) Culture clashes
There are a lot of wedding traditions on both sides that can be difficult to fit together into one perfect wedding, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider the feelings of more traditional family members. For example, in pachycephalosaurus culture, it is normal for the family of the bride to pay for the entire wedding, while in asteroid culture it is customary for everyone at the wedding to shear off a piece of precious metal from their body and put it into a collection plate and offer it to the venue as payment. You’ll have to get creative if you want to try and satisfy everyone, but it is worth the effort to arrive at a compromise. At one pachycephalosaurus/asteroid wedding, they let the bride’s family pay for the reception, and the precious metals from the collection plate were melted down and served as drinks! Everyone agreed it was the perfect solution.
It’s impossible to have a perfect wedding, especially with dinosaurs and meteors involved. But with a positive attitude, you can minimize the awkwardness and start your marriage off with a solid base that will help you for the rest of your lives – because if you think your problems are hard now, wait till that first pregnancy/YORP-based disintegration into smaller meteorites!
