Hi Reader,

Does it sound fair to consider the wedding one of the most professional moments in one's private life? One could fill pages with written and unwritten rules, things we must do and cannot do. There are speeches with expected lengths, rituals nobody can explain the origin of and everybody would notice missing, a part of our bank account that behaves like a project budget, and over all of it the sentence the most beautiful day of your life! It's not even a wish. It's a specification. People hire professionals to make it happen. That's how professional this is.

We celebrated our wedding last week and a prominent sentence right on top of the invitation said: Bring your own moustache 🥸

There was nothing profound behind it. We hosted a party once where a few moustaches sparked everyone's creativity and ended in a face-dance competition. So we put the line on the invitation believing it would be hilarious, but without thinking it all through (just yet).

That came later, when we sat down to actually plan the celebration. By the time we were done we had a full Moustache Bingo — find the person with the walrus and ask them a question — and a Moustache Zodiac reading, to find out what your moustache says about your personality. We were so pleased with ourselves that we briefly discussed selling the whole thing as a party kit.

Then the day came, and people took the line in completely different ways. Some grew their own, which means committing to a decision about their face for six weeks for our wedding. Some arrived already wearing one. Some carried one in a pocket all afternoon and pressed it on later in the evening, on the dance floor. Only a few didn't wear any at all.

Because there is no rulebook on how to wear a stick-on moustache. There is no etiquette for it, no precedent, nobody has ever seen it done properly. So there was nothing to be wrong about, and whatever people made of it became the way it was done.

At other weddings I have sat through the looks, the discomfort, the overthinking about being over- or underdressed, the quiet pressure to keep to the timing. We had none of it. Our guests didn't even have a mask to drop. Only a moustache to take off.

Mirjam and I are convinced it was the moustache. Not the 24-hour cake buffet we crowd-sourced from our guests.

We never used the Bingo. We never used the Zodiac. The Moustache Party Kit is still available for investment.

🎤 Waiting for you on the Unprofessionalism podcast:

Kate calls professionalism a false safety: the suit, the right behaviour, the private life kept at home, all so nobody sees the part of us that might be judged. It is also what we ask of each other, when we expect a colleague to show up in a way that isn't confronting for anyone else in the room.

Then Facebook opened up beyond college students and those lines collapsed. One woman in Kate's PhD research never drank, and her landlord questioned her over a photo of her pretending to chug a beer as a joke. In 2007, Kate asked Mark Zuckerberg whether Facebook would let people keep their different contexts apart. His answer, she recalls, was no. In his view, being different in different parts of your life was lying.

Kate's own way through is to choose where she is real, and then build what lets her be. She is open about her ADHD at work, which means a missed detail gets read as how she is wired rather than as carelessness — but only because she named it first, before anyone else had to interpret it for her. And when she brings Lego into a sceptical room, her research, her PhD and the word "serious" in LEGO Serious Play go in ahead of her. The armour buys the play.

This episode invites you to reflect on:

• The parts of ourselves we keep out of work because they might be judged, and how much safety that really buys
• What a first meeting could reveal about fit if we showed up as we are
• How we read a colleague's lateness or small mistake, and what we tell ourselves when we make one

🎧 Click here to listen to the interview

📥 Download my 1-page summary

​UP_035_Summary.pdf​

Watch us on Youtube

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📝 Unprofessionalism on Substack

I’ll be sharing a full article on our unprofessional wedding on Substack. While waiting, you can check out an earlier piece on the time I told my future wife that I don't do coffee.

Read it here: https://unprofessionalism.substack.com/p/i-dont-do-coffee​

That's it from my side. I hope to see you in two weeks!

Myriam