I Do or I Die!

It started with an atomic mushroom and ended with a magic set of words. 

For over a year and a half, my beloved Lifestyle editor (and wedding ninang) Tita Millet Mananquil along with my desk editor Scott Garceau (yes, he is beloved to me, too) allowed me (well, allowed may not be to the appropriate word. Tolerated is more like it) to chronicle my merry march towards domestic incarceration.  

And, voila, I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters (As Told to him by his Yaya) was born! For my three female readers, fellow DOMs and my No Girlfriend Since Birth (NGSB) barkada who have not been religiously following this column since its inception, here a few excerpts from the book. I beseech you to pick up a copy of the book and help me finance RJ Ledesma’s foundation for his baby’s college education plan.

On the engagement

I recall a telephone conversation with one of my best friends whom I first confided in with regard to my marriage plans. Although I confess that I couldn’t really understand him clearly because his voice sounded muffled. I think it was because he was hiding in the closet while his wife was screaming for him to give her a pedicure.  

“RJ,” he whispered, “marriage has its ups and downs. And the best way to deal with the downs is with anti-inflammatory medication. But when you’ve screwed up really bad, the best thing that you can give her is the memory of a great engagement.”

Heeding the dictates of my inner cheese, I decided that I would serenade her for my proposal. (Some of you might be under the impression that I was gunning for the best marriage proposal of the year, but you must understand that the very idea that I was dating this fantastic woman is almost as unbelievable as this chief executive surviving her term of office. We knew of each other in college, but during those days our paths never crossed. One of us was a cheerleader slash model, the other was a debate team captain slash geek. And to this day, I still don’t know what she saw in a cheerleader like me.) 

So I came up with an engagement song list that I thought would capture the spirit of a twilight marriage proposal, however Afternoon Delight or Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me didn’t seem quite right. After much soul-searching and weaning myself away from WRock, I decided on a medley of three songs that were a cross section of boy band pop, drippy romance and classic Frank Sinatra (because you can never go wrong with Frank): Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around, Julia Fordham by way of Nina’s Love Moves in Mysterious Ways, and Frank Sinatra’s Someday. I was tempted to sneak in Sting’s Every Breath You Take and Adam Sandler’s comical I Wanna Grow Old With You, but after a good smacking in the head by my best friend, he reminded me, “This is a harana (serenade), you fool, not a night at the karaoke club.”

During the proposal, I tried to belt out the rest of my well-crafted medley, but the lyrics had melted away from my head once she hid her tears behind her hand. So I just hummed out the tunes to the songs that I had so agonizingly memorized and inconveniently forgotten, and drew her close to me as we swayed to the beat of our hearts. 

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Because this is not the dress I wanted to wear for my engagement.” We both laughed.

“My love for you has grown like a mustard seed.” I proclaimed. She crumpled her nose and raised an eyebrow. Later I found out that she thought I had said, “My love for you has grown like an atomic mushroom.” Up to now, I am still unsure as to what sort of hard drugs she had taken before our trip to Tagaytay. But after the initial confusion, she finally recognized the next line: “I love you and I would like to do yoga with you for the rest of my life.”

I pulled out a small red box from my coat pocket and slowly coaxed it open. 

“Will you marry me?”

And so here we were in a torch-lit garden along the windswept mountain ridges of Tagaytay overlooking Taal Volcano, with the sun lazily descending over the lake, and blessed by the presence of those nearest and dearest to us. What would be her answer? 

“Yes,” she cooed. 

Whew. I didn’t have to sorrowfully consume copious amounts of alcohol that night.

On the wedding preparations

I didn’t really plan to get involved in my wedding preparations for health reasons. This is because I always thought that a bride-to-be was much like a boxer in training for a title bout. They are fierce, they are focused, and if you distract them in any way they will leave you a candidate for brain damage. If I left my fiancée alone to pick the patterns for her bridesmaids’ dresses, she would leave me alone to plan for my pre- and post- bachelor’s parties. (No, love. I promise you that was just a joke. There will be no other girls in the room aside from those you can watch in the videoke. Just because we were holding the bachelor’s parties in Air Force One doesn’t mean that there is anything else going on.)

There is a reason why there is a glut of wedding magazines, wedding checklists and wedding management software applications for the brides-to-be, but there is no such equivalent for the grooms-to-be. This is because there are only five things a man must know in preparation for his wedding day:

1. To do whatever his bride-to-be tells him to do;

2. To know what day his wedding is supposed to be;

3. To know what he is supposed to wear for the wedding;

4. To know if he will be paying in check, card or with the sale of another vital organ, and;

5. To know if his bride-to-be will kindly, kindly allow her groom to have a very modest bachelor’s party (Please, love. Please, please, please. It will only be with videoke).

Men may not know this, but our significant others have been play-acting their ideal wedding scenario in their heads since they were little children. My fiancée shared with me that when she was eight years old, her dream was to dress like Cinderella in her wedding gown while she walked down the aisle. When she was a teenager, she wanted to dress like Princess Diana in her wedding dress. And as a — ahem — young adult, she wants to dress like Eva Longoria in her wedding gown.    

On the other hand, we have slightly different childhood dreams from their fiancées. At eight years old, my dream was to become a superhero. When I was a teenager, my dream was to become a bomba (naked) star. When I was in my twenties, my dream was to become filthy rich. When I hit my thirties, I wanted to keep my dreams simple. So I wanted to become a filthy rich superhero bomba star.  

On the Pamanhikan

Ah, the pamanhikan. It is a time-honored ritual in our country, much the same way that pagtutuli (circumcision) and self-flagellation during Holy Week are rituals. All these rituals involve some pain, some bloodletting and some close encounters with the loss of genitalia. However, remember that the pamanhikan is only the penultimate step in this ritualized hazing process. Before your potential father-in-law can even cock a rifle at your forehead, grit his teeth and blurt out, “Ano ba yung plano mo para sa anak ko (What are your plans for my daughter)?” in front of your whole family, you must first undergo the background checks, the massive credit card loans, and the failed assassination attempts that form part of your panliligaw (courtship).   

And as all Pinoy men know, when you make ligaw (court) a woman, you are making ligaw the totality of that woman. And that sum total includes her lola, her lola’s yaya, her titos, her titas, her cousins, her pamangkins (buy her godkids something that looks really expensive), her relatives within the sixth degree of consanguinity, her family friends, her barkada, her high school classmates, her college classmates, her officemates, her supervisor, her gym partners, her kickboxing teacher (be especially nice to him), her church community, her father confessor (try not to go to confession with him), her barangay captain, her manicurista, her hair stylist, everyone in the contacts list of her cellphone, and all of her Facebook friends. And, of course, her yaya (but make sure your own yaya knows that she occupies a special place in your heart). 

All eyes on the dinner table slowly turned toward my fiancée’s dad. Her dad uncrossed his arms, placed both his hands on the table. Everyone stopped fidgeting in his seat. He lifted the wine glass to his mouth, took a sip, and, in his best Marlon Brando impression, rasped “When you spoke to me about….” He then paused and took another sip of wine. “I think you are very good for each other and that you asked my daughter at the right time in her life. So, I told myself when I got back to Manila I would give you an answer.” He looked up at the ceiling and exhaled. “Which is maybe yes.”

I got up from my seat to shake her dad’s hand. But as I approached him, he stood up and extended both his arms. “Welcome to the family,” he smiled and gave me a nice, firm hug. While we hugged, my future father-in-law bent down and whispered into my ear. “Remember, the prenuptial agreement has a two-year redemption period.” Then he hugged me tighter. “But I’ve always let it lapse.” Now let’s get you fitted with a chastity belt.

On the wedding day

When the church doors swung open, I thought my bride would surprise me with some drama. But there were no smoke machines, no midget circus acrobats and no slow-moving doves from a John Woo movie. Watching my bride glide down the aisle was dramatic enough. And she glided down like an angel. I wished time would slow to a crawl so that everyone in the church could marvel at how radiant my bride looked that evening. And it almost felt that way as she moved slowly yet regally toward the altar. Later on I found out she moved so slowly because the wedding dress weighed about three hundred pounds.

It took her a good 30 minutes to make her way down the aisle because one of her Bible-thumping aunts hopped in front of the walkway and played patintero with my soon-to-be-bride while screeching, “Pray to the Lord! Pray to the Heavens! Pray to God that he is the right one for yooouuu!!!” After my mom had knocked her aunt out with a stiletto heel, we thought that everything would proceed smoothly, except that her dad had feigned a heart attack.

When my bride and I finally plopped down from exhaustion onto our matrimonial bed, all legal-like and church-approved, I turned over to her and excitedly whispered. “There’s one last thing that I have to do.”

Her eyes grew large. “You don’t need that anymore, love. We’re married now!”

I picked up my cellphone and held it in front of her face. I scrolled over to her name on my phone’s contact list, and edited her entry. She looked at me and broke out into a smile when my phone finally read “Vanessa Ledesma.”

“Wala nang bawian (There’s no more refund),” I snickered. Then I gently lifted her head, and gently kissed my wife on the lips. And this was as close to heaven as I was ever going to get.

* * *

The book launch and signing of I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters is tomorrow (Thursday) at National Bookstore, Glorietta 5, Makati City at 6 pm. The book is available at National Bookstore and Powerbooks nationwide. You can also order the book directly from Anvil Publishing: http://www.anvilpublishing.com/bookdetails.php?id=2009000091. For more details, please visit www.rjledesma.net.