Karamo Brown’s wedding will be nothing short of amazing come September, especially if his most recent interview on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me is any indication. The Queer Eye personality, who got engaged to director Ian Jordan in May 2018, is in full wedding planning mode, but his enthusiasm has not come without some serious costs: his fiancé’s health.
On a recent episode of the popular NPR podcast, Brown revealed that Jordan has had not one, but two, anxiety attacks since the pair started planning their wedding, and from the sounds of it, Brown’s ambitious wedding visions are most certainly to blame. “This wedding is ridiculous,” Brown told host Peter Sagal. “It’s actually sent my fiancé to the hospital twice already because of anxiety attacks. And I’m not saying this very proudly.”
When prodded about why exactly Jordan had to make two trips to the hospital, Brown explained that it likely had to do with the ferris wheels (plural) and peacocks he’d arranged to be there with them on their big day.
“So the thing was that the first time when I put the deposit down for our ferris wheels …” Brown began, before being cut off by exclamations and laughter from the audience. He noted that the second anxiety attack was spurred by the time he “went to a spot here in L.A where you can get peacocks trained to show their bloom of their feathers at the same time.”
“So I wanted … when I say, ‘I do,’ for [the] peacock feathers to go up,” he explained. “… it’s very possible to do, because peacocks can be trained, but it gives [Jordan] a lot of anxiety. I don’t know why.”
Jordan isn’t the only one to struggle with wedding planning anxiety, which is common amongst engaged couples. Experts recommend couples set positive goals that are healthy, while accepting that imperfections are inevitable with wedding days. In fact, they make for good stories.
The wedding is nearly two years in the making with Brown exclusively telling The Knot in June 2018, a month after he got engaged, that he’s been looking forward to the big day since he was little. “I’m in full planning mode,” he said at the time. “Because when I was a boy and I was 7, I was already planning my wedding. I knew it wasn’t legal at the time. But in my mind, I had faith in our country that one day, my love would be recognized. It was literally [recently] watching people like RuPaul that had me thinking, ‘It has to be!’”
The couple was previously set to be wed at the Merv Griffin Estate in Palm Springs, where wanted all their guests in one spot to ensure a memorable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. “It’s beautiful because I want everyone to be on the estate and I want it to be a big party … We want all of our friends from college and our family—mine is overseas from Jamaica and Cuba—to be there, so we had to plan,” he told us at the time. “It’s not like people are down the street, and his family, they’re working class people from Maine, so we want to give everyone more than enough time.”
Additionally, the ceremony is expected to be a blend of both Brown and Jordan’s cultures, from the wedding traditions down to the menu. As for color schemes, Brown has had that locked down for nearly two years.
“I have a folder for our outfits and our color scheme,” he said in the same interview. “Since it’s a fall wedding, we’re doing a plaid with navy and green. There will also be some moments that I’m already planning because I’m big on surprises.”