Normally, This Would Be Cause for Concern

by Danielle Fishel

  I had been so good about keeping my wedding date a secret, and that was not easy for me. Where Rider is very private, I am much more of an open book. Every time someone asked me when I was getting married, I wanted to blurt out “October 19!” But I didn’t. My go-to line was “Before the end of the year.” Perfect, right? Completely truthful yet totally ambiguous, and that’s the way I wanted it. We were getting married in downtown Los Angeles, a paparazzi minefield. I don’t usually have a problem with paparazzi following me, because I don’t go to many parties/clubs/famous restaurants (you can, however, find me in Red Robin regularly). Plus, I live fifty miles outside of LA and purposefully avoid areas that are well-known locations where celebrities and paparazzi hang out. If there was ever going to be a day when I didn’t want to be called Topanga or have paparazzi snapping pictures of me, it was my wedding day.

  Our wedding weekend arrived, and on the morning of October 18, I ran a load of dishes in the dishwasher, turned on the TV, and sat down on the couch with my morning coffee and my cell phone. That’s my morning ritual; I love to simultaneously watch the news and read my Twitter feed to start my day. One of the first Tweets I read said, Aw! Danielle and Rider are getting married on the same weekend? Huh? What? How does this stranger on Twitter know this information? I kept scrolling through my feed until I saw a re-Tweet from an online magazine to which Rider had given a quote. He had confirmed that he was getting married that weekend and concluded with, Bad news: Danielle Fishel’s getting married this same weekend, so I’m missing some of my Boy Meets World family (that was my fault, she chose the date first).

  “Rider King Strong, what in the ever-loving H-E-double-hockey-sticks did you do?” I said to myself. You could tell I was mad because I used his middle name and an almost bad word. I calmly reminded myself that no one knew the exact location of my nuptials and that I probably didn’t have anything to be concerned about.

  I decided not to spend any more time worrying about it and to continue my busy morning. It was the day before my wedding, and I had a nail appointment at nine A.M. Then Tim and I were leaving for LA at noon, because we had our rehearsal dinner that night at a hotel right next to our wedding venue, Vibiana, which had previously been a stunning Catholic cathedral but was now a historic LA site for private events. Once we left the house, we wouldn’t be returning home until after our Hawaiian honeymoon, so we had a ton of things to bring with us.

  I stood up from the couch and walked barefoot through my kitchen so I could go upstairs to shower. I stepped in a puddle. “Dammit, Spike!” I said out loud. I assumed Spike had been a bad boy and peed on the floor, which, by the way, was totally likely. But then I looked down. The whole kitchen was covered in a half inch of water, but of course it was. Why wouldn’t my dishwasher break for the first time the day I was leaving for the biggest weekend of my life? I went upstairs and grabbed five bath towels. I cleaned up all the water on the floor and texted Tim, who was at the gym for a pre-wedding-weekend workout.

  Dishwasher broken. Water everywhere. Google “flooding dishwasher” when you get home, and please try to fix this while I get my nails done? Love you.

  I love Tim, but I honestly did not expect anything to be fixed when I got home. Tim has many talents, but being a plumber/handyman is not one of them. To be fair, I also don’t possess those skills and have to ask my mom to come over and help me hang picture frames. But on this day, this crazy but about to be magical day, Tim managed to fix our flooding dishwasher! It was a wedding miracle. And my nails looked fabulous, and as we all know, that was way more important than any stupid dishwasher.

  Tim and I loaded up the car and got on the road to LA. The rest of the day ran smoothly, and our wedding rehearsal and dinner went off without a hitch. My cousin’s husband, also named Tim, was kind enough to take pictures for us.

  As you can see, we basically made out the entire night. Our siblings looked really happy about it. I thought our rehearsal dinner was wonderful, but I had absolutely no idea what was in store for me the next day.

  Because I love a few traditional wedding elements, Tim and I stayed in separate rooms the night before our wedding. My mom agreed to share a room with me, and when we woke up in the morning, I felt fantastic. I kept waiting for it to hit me that it was my actual wedding day, but it didn’t until much later. I invited my bridesmaids over for breakfast and gave them their “thank you for spending tons of money and all of your time over the last year on me” gifts. A few minutes later, we made the short walk to the venue to have our hair and makeup done. Everyone looked so incredibly gorgeous, and when Tim and I saw each other for the first time, during our private first-look pictures, we both broke down in tears—it finally hit us that we were about to be husband and wife, and we were so full of joy.

  To get inside Vibiana, all of our guests had to pass through gorgeous oversized black doors. One of the pictures on my “must-have photo list” was Tim and me standing alone outside with the large doors as our backdrop. Before we could take that picture, we needed to take our family photos. Directly opposite the large black doors at Vibiana’s entrance was the altar where Tim and I would be saying “I do” later that day. I really wanted a photo with both our families, which wasn’t very easy, since the Fishel crew alone rolls about forty deep. But since the altar had a few stairs, we figured that was a perfect place to gather and stack fifty people for a portrait.

  When we finished taking what felt like 382 family pictures, I asked my photographer if we could go outside to take the picture of Tim and me in front of the doors at the entrance. She said, “I was just told we can’t go out there because there are paparazzi everywhere.” That news certainly didn’t make me happy, but honestly, I was filled with so much joy that day that nothing was going to get me down. Plus, Vibiana was a private venue, and I had hired security, so I wasn’t too worried about paparazzi sneaking onto the property. If not being able to take pictures in front of my favorite black doors because of paparazzi was going to be the worst thing to happen on my wedding day, I was not going to complain.

  That actually was the worst thing to happen that day. I really don’t have enough words in my vocabulary to properly describe to you what an otherworldly day our wedding day was. It was, hands down, the most spectacular, love-filled, joyful, peaceful, and fun day of our lives, to date. I refuse to believe that my wedding day was the best day of my life, because I believe that the best is always yet to come. However, it was definitely the best day I had ever experienced up to that point.

  The morning after the wedding, Tim and I walked to breakfast with some friends who were in our wedding party. On our way, we stopped in front of Vibiana and took a picture, as husband and wife, in front of the large black doors I loved so much but had been prohibited from taking pictures in front of the night before. We took one picture smiling at the camera and another one a second later where we were kissing.

  We continued our walk to a local restaurant and had a great meal with our friends while we laughed and reminisced about the previous night. As the bride and groom, you don’t really get to party at your own wedding. You spend most of your time making sure you’ve walked around and thanked everyone for coming, so it was fun to hear our friends’ stories about their experiences—who drank too much, who spent the most time in the photo booth, who never left the dance floor. Overall, it was yet another near-perfect day.

  After breakfast, our friends left us in Los Angeles and headed home. Tim and I called two of my best girlfriends, Julie and Kristy, who had flown in from New York for our wedding. They were staying at a hotel relatively close to ours, so we made plans to get together with them that night. Even though Tim and I were both exhausted, we didn’t want to pass up another opportunity to see them. We didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with them at the wedding, and our usual three-thousand-mile distance was currently only eight miles, so how on earth could we pass that up?

  Tim and I had a drink in the lobby bar and headed up to our room to change. We
had clothes, luggage, shoes, and makeup all over the place. OK, I had makeup all over the place. Tim doesn’t (currently) wear makeup. We were leaving the next morning at 11:38 from Los Angeles International Airport to Maui, Hawaii, for our honeymoon, and I had arranged for a car to pick us up from our hotel at nine A.M. This time schedule allowed us a lot of extra time at the airport, but that’s exactly how I like to travel/do everything in life: on time and without rushing. We weren’t planning on getting home from Julie and Kristy’s hotel too late, so we figured we had plenty of time to pack when we got home later that evening or, worst case, first thing the next morning.

  We called a cab and met Julie and Kristy at their hotel at around eight P.M. They had ordered a bottle of champagne, which the four of us quickly consumed while sitting outside, next to the pool, in the relatively warm LA nighttime air. We quickly moved from champagne to vodka sodas, and then Tim noticed a ping-pong table. Julie, Kristy, Tim, and I are four of the most competitive people who roam this planet. I’m not kidding. We will compete over anything, even if that thing is an awful, no-good, very bad thing. We once got into a friendly but competitive argument over which one of us had previously been the meanest when drunk. That meant we started “bragging” about the times when we had been the most awful humans while intoxicated, because we all wanted to “win” that “competition.” Nice, huh? (And don’t ask me who won, because I’m not telling.)

  Three rounds of vodka sodas later, it was ten thirty P.M., and we were loudly, and poorly, playing ping-pong. The hotel manager came outside and told us to keep it down, because guests were trying to sleep and we were being too loud. We apologized and tried to keep our voices down for about five minutes before we forgot all about the other guests and continued with our drinking and ping-pong shenanigans. At eleven thirty, we were kindly but firmly kicked out of the outside pool area.

  At seven A.M., I woke up in bed and looked over my shoulder to find Tim. He wasn’t there—but Julie and Kristy were. I realized Tim was sprawled across the bottom of the bed by our feet and immediately started laughing. He woke up within one second, and I whispered, “Babe, we need to go back to our hotel. The car is going to be there in two hours, and we still need to pack and check out.”

  So there we were, newlyweds of less than forty-eight hours, doing a full-blown walk of shame from one Los Angeles hotel to another. I had mascara smudged under both my eyes, my head felt like it weighed eighty-five pounds, I was starving, and I had an incurable case of the giggles. Tim and I waited for our cab outside of Julie and Kristy’s hotel—thank God, there were no paparazzi that morning, huh? Every time a car drove by, I envisioned the people driving past us thinking, Look at those two losers! Ha! I bet it’s so awkward because they barely know each other! I desperately wanted everyone to know that I was walk-of-shaming with my husband, thank you. It’s so much classier that way (it absolutely is not).

  We got back to our hotel, showered, and packed our bags as quickly as we could. At 9:05 A.M., we hopped into our car and left for the airport. I hadn’t been on Twitter or Instagram since the day before our wedding, and now that we had some time, I decided to post the picture we took in front of Vibiana the day before. Immediately after I posted it, I saw Tweets from a certain weekly gossip magazine that I won’t name here. They had a photo of Tim, some family members, and me standing at the altar while we were taking family pictures before our wedding ceremony. It said, “See this exclusive shot of Danielle Fishel’s wedding dress!” The picture was a paparazzi shot, supposedly taken from across the street, during one of the few seconds the double doors had opened to let in an elderly guest. Neither Tim nor I looked particularly good, because we were in the middle of intently listening to our photographer, whose back you could see in the photo. I was livid. I scrolled to the comments section to see what people were saying about the photo. I’m not really sure why I did that, to be honest. I know better than to check the comments section of any story, especially one about me, because 99.99 percent of the time, they are negative, hate-filled messages. I think I just felt violated knowing someone had stolen a moment from one of the most precious days of my life and wanted to see what the reaction was.

  The first few comments consisted of things like “She really should have lost some weight for her wedding,” or “She looks fat,” or “They don’t look very happy,” or, my personal favorite, “People really need to work on their resting faces. They look miserable, especially that bitch for a bridesmaid.” That “bitch for a bridesmaid” happened to be my amazingly sweet sixteen-year-old sister-in-law, and who on God’s great earth works on their resting face? Was the person posting this comment a professional happy-resting-face-ologist? I don’t think that job exists, but if it does and that is how you make a living, go screw yourself.

  In some sort of furious, postwedding Bridezilla moment, I grabbed my phone and Tweeted: Ppl saying I was FAT @ my wedding: u r the worst kind of ppl on the PLANET. I weigh 107 pounds & am 5'1''. YOU are the reason anorexia exists.

  In hindsight, I have mixed emotions about whether I should have responded to the negativity at all. On one hand, bringing attention to negative people by calling them out on Twitter is usually not a good idea. That has a tendency to create more negativity, and in a sense, you’ve only opened yourself up for more judgment. People love to say that celebrities don’t have a right to complain, because they chose a profession that puts them in the public eye and “that’s why they make the big bucks.” To an extent, that is true, and most of the time, I am really good about letting things roll off my back. I don’t “feed the trolls,” as they say. On the other hand, just because I am in the public eye, that doesn’t mean that I no longer have the right to stand up for myself. I despise that we live in a culture where a woman’s self-worth is determined by her appearance and weight. Let’s say I was “fat” on my wedding day—what would that mean? Would that mean I wasn’t entitled to wear a beautiful wedding dress and marry the man I love? Would that mean I was unlovable, incapable of giving love, and undeserving of a day to celebrate love with my closest friends and family?

  Our society’s obsession with women’s weight makes me so angry. Think about the message this sends to young girls. On Girl Meets World, I play the mom of a twelve-year-old girl named Riley Matthews. In real life, I spend a lot of time on set with the girl who brings Riley to life, Rowan Blanchard. I also spend a lot of time with Sabrina Carpenter, who plays Riley’s best friend, Maya. Despite the fact that I am not a mom to children of my own, these girls’ names, faces, and minds popped into my head when I read that people believed I looked fat on my wedding day. I knew these two girls in particular, and maybe other young girls, looked up to me. I didn’t want them to read the “she’s so fat” comments online and then look at me and make a conscious or unconscious decision never to let themselves get that “fat.” I am not a stick-thin model, and I never have been, but that is perfectly OK. Not only was I standing up for myself, but I truly felt like I was taking a stance on behalf of every young girl who looked up to me.

  After I hit send on the Tweet, Tim looked at me and said, “You didn’t say anything publicly, did you?”

  “Of course I did,” I said. “I just Tweeted about it.”

  He implored me to shut my phone off and not look at anything online for the rest of the day. He had a point. We were in a car on our way to the airport to leave for our honeymoon. What business did online comments from strangers have in this once-in-a-lifetime experience?

  We got to the airport at 9:45 A.M., grabbed our bags, and went inside to check in. We handed the attendant our driver’s licenses and discussed what we should do with the extra time we had before our flight took off. Tim was starving and wanted to eat, but I reminded him that we would get to eat on the plane, because we were flying first class. I love first class and am fortunate enough to get to fly that way when I travel for work. It’s just too expensive for us normally, but my dad was generous enough to buy us first-class honeymoon tickets as a
wedding present. I could not wait to get on that plane, cuddle up on Tim’s shoulder, and have a glass of champagne.

  After we had been standing at the counter for longer than it should normally take to check two people in for a flight, the attendant said, “Do you have your reservation number? I’m not showing a flight that leaves at eleven thirty-eight A.M.” Oh, God. Tim and I looked at each other with wild eyes. Please don’t tell me I screwed this up, please don’t tell me I screwed this up, I kept repeating inside my head. I pulled out my phone and searched through my emails to find our reservation number. Right there, in an email from my dad, was our flight information.

  “I thought our Maui arrival time was our departure time!” I frantically said out loud to no one in particular.

  Tim looked at me and immediately burst out laughing. It took me three seconds to realize why he thought this was so funny, and then I started laughing with him. He said, “Honey, you and I are so ridiculously anal when it comes to travel and time management. How did neither one of us think to double-check our departure time?”

  I didn’t really have a good answer for him, but I think it was just one wedding detail that fell through the cracks.

  Luckily, the attendant was able to get us on the next flight, coach rather than first class, and we happily took it. Before we left the check-in station, Tim asked if this was going to change anything for our return flight. The attendant assured us that everything would stay the same for our flight home, but Tim wanted to be really sure. He asked her to double-check it in the computer, which she did. She looked up our return flight and said that this change in our departure flight would absolutely not change anything about our return flight. Reassured, Tim and I left to go through security.