It's All Part of the Plan

I'm told that September is the best time of year to visit the Hamptons -- the summer crowds are long gone but the sun still shines down, warming the beautiful beaches. At least that's what Mike and Rachel's wedding Web site promised. Which was good to know as I packed my bag to go watch them tie the knot in that off-season splendor this weekend.

Their ceremony marked the homestretch of Wedding Season '08, which has been an endurance challenge. I've been invited to six nuptials this year: one each in Manila (which included pre-wedding events in Hong Kong and post-wedding events in the Philippine countryside), Westchester County, Princeton, N.J., Chicago (which I regretfully declined), the Hamptons and Savannah, Ga.

It's fine that I don't live in any of these places -- but neither do the brides and grooms. So each event involved a staggering amount of legwork. Enter the planning industry.

According to the Association for Wedding Professionals International, the number of part- and full-time wedding consultants has doubled from 60,000 in the early 1990s to 120,000 last year. And though the financial sector has crumbled around us in the past few weeks, it's not clear that brides will stop using planners; if anything, they'll want to make sure they're spending their nickels and dimes on just the perfect bouquet. Although we once thought of these clipboard wielders as superfluous, even silly (see Martin Short in the 1991 movie "Father of the Bride"), we've now come to accept them. After all, how can you be expected to find the most beautiful, the most distinctive and, hey, the most eco-friendly table centerpiece for the biggest day of your life in a city you don't even live in?

My friend who walked down the aisle in Manila swears that having a planner was a necessity. She thought that the professional dancers mingling on the floor were, too, but she has a point about the planner. Though my friend was born in Manila, she lives in London and could get back only once before the big day. Her reliance on outsourcing reflects what a growing number of people are doing -- it's an adaptive strategy that helps us wade through the swelling tide of choices we face.

But help in the relentless pursuit of perfection isn't in vogue only for nuptials. It has spilled over into other rites of passage. Recently, Melissa Moog, owner of an independent baby-consultant company, founded the National Baby Planner Association -- 25 members strong and growing. Moog says she has been flooded with applications to join her group -- more than 200 inquiries in the past few months from women wanting to start their own baby-planning businesses. So do these consultants coach you through the actual birth? No, but for a fee -- the average person spends $300 to $400, she estimates -- they can help you feng shui your nursery, set up your gift registry, find a nanny or, in some cases, come up with just the right name for your bundle of stress. Where does the need come from? As Moog sees it, "We're inundated with too many choices in the baby-gear market."

And don't forget the other end of the spectrum: funeral planners. "Planning a funeral is like planning a wedding, except you generally plan a wedding over six to nine months, and you plan a funeral in about 12 to 24 hours," Mark Duffy, the founder of Everest Funeral Package, a Houston-based funeral planning service, told CBS's "Early Show" earlier this year. The interview was included in a three-part series called "Funerals to Die For" (yes, they went there). The trend of planning these elaborate sendoffs, the voiceover explained as a cheery graphic of cartoon daisies and a shovel flashed on the screen, is being driven by those ever-wacky and self-centered baby boomers. They want the best, and they'll pay to get it: $495 for basic consulting services at Everest, not counting the supplies -- you know, like the casket.

As someone who is, to be generous, detail-challenged, I understand this desire for help with the nitty-gritty (I wouldn't have minded having someone find my flights, book my hotels, rent my cars and match my shoes to my dresses for all those weddings I went to). But when someone's concerned with getting just the right casket, starring in his very own $75,000 memorial video (as one healthy California man did a couple of years ago) and setting the perfect graveside atmosphere, you have to start wondering what else is at play. Why, since these events have been happening since the dawn of man, have we only recently begun to outsource them?

This hyper-planning hysteria may seem crazy, but it makes more sense when you think about the prep work -- and emphasis on perfection -- we put into even the most mundane daily tasks. We live in a world where we research salons before deciding whom we'll allow to paint our toenails, look at every hotel in an area before booking one for vacation and even compare the types of bulbs in various brands of flashlights before we choose one for the junk drawer. Most of us don't hire planners because we lack time or a work ethic (not completely, anyway) but because we don't trust ourselves to do anything as well as it needs to be done. That's the crazy part. So the bigger question is, where does this lack of confidence come from?

Every time my live-in boyfriend and I order takeout for dinner, he hops online to find the best option. If we want Thai food, he searches for the reviews that will tell us who in our New York neighborhood makes the best pad Thai, who's known for their curry and who cooks their spring rolls to just the right crisp. It often ends up taking the better part of an hour. Overwhelmed (him), angry (me) and famished (both of us), we usually end up ordering from our go-to place anyway. "It's good enough," I say, and mean it. But he -- like many people I know -- is left with the nagging sensation that there's something else, something better out there.

The 35 Thai restaurant listings for our neighborhood on MenuPages, a local Web site, or the 102 Manhattan entries on Chowhound.com are supposed to be a good thing, are supposed to increase the pleasure of our Thai-food-ordering experience and the confidence that we're choosing correctly. Or so the consumer-driven thinking goes. But in the past decade or so, the psychological world has begun seriously studying the assumption that more choice is good.

At first thought, studying a surplus of choices seems like a tremendous waste of resources. Of course options are good; without them, we might as well live in East Berlin circa 1986. But in various studies, researchers have found that too much choice -- whether in a 401(k) portfolio, a job search or a grocery store -- produces paralysis. And when it doesn't, the choices we make, even when sound, often result in regrets over the road -- or wedding-cake topper -- not taken.