Diary of a Wedding Planner

I recently took a little weekend trip away to Brighton for an industry event, but also to spend some time with family in the place I call my second home. Whilst there, my aunt and I spent two days volunteering at the ‘Living History’ weekend at Newhaven Fort, where she also works. Now I admit I don’t need much of an excuse to get dressed up vintage-style on a normal day, so spending two days wearing full victory rolls and red lipstick dressed as WWII women was my idea of a good giggle!

My task for the weekend was to allow visitors to get ‘Hands on with History’ telling them about the selection of items we had on display which were genuine artefacts from the first and second world war available for them to look at, touch and try on.

One item which caught my attention was a genuine 1943 copy of Woman and Home. Whilst browsing through this on my tea break, I came across an article called ‘Another Girl’s Shoes.’ It was very difficult not to read this article to myself in an upper-class war-time information voice-over, but I resisted, and as a modern-day wedding planner it struck me as an interesting little read which I thought I would share with you here on the blog… enjoy!

When you meet an engaged man – do you look on him as what he is – pledged to another girl?

Are you one of those girls who are building your house of happiness on the foundation of another’s heartbreak?

In other words, have you and an engaged man fallen in love with eachother? And has he broken off his engagement on your account? 

“But he loves me best,” you say, “and surely, if that is the case, it is wiser to find it out and shed the old love.”

Well, of course this is sometimes the case, and it may be true that it is fairer to the other girl, if he really has ceased to love her, to tell her so.

But has he – or does he only think he has?

That is the danger for you – the girl who has taken him away. Men do not always know their own hearts, any more than the girls do. They are not always quite sure that they are really through with that first girl, who has a prior claim on them. She may be far away, in some remote part of rural England, or the Highlands of Scotland, and you may be in the big city, or near the camp where his unit is. All this is in your favour, for it makes for forgetting. And sooner, or later, he tells you that he loves you the better than the fiancée he sees so rarely and from whom he will get free.

All the more does this happen when the man is a New Zealander, a Canadian, or an American. Their fiancées are thousands of miles away, and their letters are infrequent, and their images may seem to have faded right away – for the time being anyhow.

He never thinks of her, and you certainly do not. You believe him utterly when he says it is now you he loves.

He may be sincere when he says this, but he has not allowed for many things – the glamour of novelty – the strange surroundings – the excitement bred of war tension. All the things that have helped to make that girl in the far-off home-town seem almost like a figure in a dream to him.

But you may get a bad jolt one day. You may get a letter, telling you that his wonderful new love has no strength or substance in it, and that, after all, it is his fiancée who is the one he means to stick to. 

when a man is fighting, he has plenty of time to think in between whiles and look into his heart. And it is then that at last he really knows what matters most to him. The girl who was bound to him by every tie of honour as well as home associations; or the girl he was so crazy about for a short time, crazy enough to think he had forgotten what he now knows he could never forget.

So, if you are this second girl, I feel very sorry for you, but you will get very little pity from the world, because you made the mistake of under-estimating the pull of the girl he was engaged to when he met you. 

Don’t make this mistake – will you?

When you meet an engaged man, look on him as what he is, pledged to another girl. And be very chary of being the one for whom that pledge is broken. 

Wow – I feel like I’ve just been given a good telling off – don’t you? And we readers haven’t even done anything wrong! Are we supposed to read this and judge these ‘other’ women, or judge ourselves? Or should we be made to distrust and look down upon those lustful chaps staying in town who surely must be playing away? Does it make you feel as though you can’t be trusted to make your own decisions? Or are you the long-distance fiancée now panicking over your powdered eggs? Did you find yourself putting on a silly voice in your head as you read it like I did?!

I have my thoughts on the article, but I’d love to hear yours… leave your comments below…

With love
Samantha x 

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