****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Beware when planning your wedding budget. It will turn out to be larger than you would expect. Kind of like these shoes.If you’ve never planned a wedding, but you do one day, you’re in for a treat. And surprises. As a rule, I like surprises. But not always when they involve spending more money than I anticipated.Our daughter is getting married, and we are thrilled. Truly, we could not have chosen a better match for her. I certainly tried over the years, before any of us knew her fiancé. More than once when I met a young man with promise, I would find myself envisioning his courtship of my daughter. Once well-conceived, I would share my plans with my husband, sure of his stamp of approval. Yet time after time, he dissolved my daydreams, encouraging me not to guess at what time would reveal.Then one day, our daughter began telling us about a young man she had met entirely without our assistance. Once we met him, all my silly daydreams turned to dust. He showed real promise, and over time, it became clear that he and my daughter loved one another with a love that was real and lasting. Soon he asked our permission to ask her hand in marriage and we heartily approved. Now our daughter wears his ring, which happens to be the ring his German grandfather gave to his Polish sweetheart just after World War II. Because reality can prove to be both more horrifying and more beautiful than fairytales.Which brings us to the wedding planning.As a first step to wedding planning, you will probably want to determine a budget. You will think this means something like, “total amount of money to be spent on all purchases” for your wedding. But be warned: No matter the foredetermined figure, you will soon find your budget to be, as Bilbo so aptly put it in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Things will cost more than you expect.So you will begin scraping money from other places. And you will scrape up justifications to categorize some expenditures as “outside of the budget,” because, after all, you might reuse those crystal bud vases every third Tuesday. It softens the blow a bit.Which brings us to shoes. My son has exceptionally large, wide, flat feet. They get looks. And comments. Finding shoes to accommodate them is as difficult as trying to crack a walnut with a toothpick. (Thanks, AI, for the simile suggestion.) By some stroke of grace, we once found a pair of dress shoes at a secondhand shop that work well enough. Due to this previous fortuitous find, I expected that at least that was a matter that was settled when it came to wedding planning. My son’s feet were covered. Literally.But as happens sometimes (and maybe by now you’ve figured out it happens rather more often than not,) my initial expectations were incorrect.You see, my son’s preloved dress shoes are black, and as fate would have it, my daughter’s wedding dress code would preclude that from being acceptable. The men will wear blue suits (my husband’s and son’s purchased outside of the wedding budget, naturally, since they can rewear them every time we pull out the crystal) and brown dress shoes.Brown like a walnut.It was time to take up my toothpick.I turned to Amazon. I set my filters (to almost as large and wide as they would go.) I read reviews. I scrolled. Finally, with hope undeterred by previous failures, I ordered these shoes, in a lovely nut brown.A few business days later, the shoes arrived on our doorstep. My eager expectation was akin to the proverbial child on Christmas morning as I tore barehanded into the smile-bedecked cardboard shipping box.Inside was a blue shoebox, protected by a swath of anonymous brown paper. Lifting the blue lid, I found two gauzy shrouds divided by a thin white cardboard strip. The moment was at hand.As I lifted the shoes from their encasements I examined them. For the price, they were impressive. The faux leather gave off a soft sheen. The stitching was neat and tight. And most impressive of all, they had what looked to be comfortably padded insoles with real rubber soles. It appeared I had cracked the nut.Alas, the unthinkable: Much like our wedding budget, the shoes proved to be larger than expected.My son typically wears a size 13 to 14 wide width shoe. I ordered a size 13 wide. We were both shocked to find extra space for his dogs to run once laced up inside.He requested I order a half size smaller. My only complaint about the shoe is that they do not offer this, at least on Amazon. By my estimation, they may have had enough extra room for a size 12 wide to work, but he has not fit in a shoe labeled that small since his preteen years. I find myself still working up the gumption to try.I did not receive these shoes for free in exchange for my honest review, (though I’ve always wondered how I could achieve such an honor,) so I plan to return them in exchange for what I paid. I like Amazon like that. Had the shoes fit as I’d anticipated, I would have kept them, and Amazon would have kept the payment.
