When I announced my engagement, I was amazed at the number of people whose first response wasn’t ‘congratulations,’ or ‘you must be so happy,’ but rather ‘you must be so stressed out,’ or ‘take my advice; go to Vegas now or the stress will kill you.’ To this day, I still don’t understand that response one bit. I had a great time planning my wedding, and the one thing that caused me the most annoyance in the entire process was the fact that Mr. Twistie couldn’t be convinced to care about the details so long as the result was what we were married, while I honestly wanted his personality reflected in the day at least as much as mine was. Somehow, though, we both survived and even had a great time at our own party.
Now I come from a very mellow family, had simple tastes to match my tiny budget, and was marrying a guy whose mother (his only living relative at the time) thought I hung the moon. All of that helped no end. I wasn’t juggling twenty peoples’ very different expectations, trying to have a champagne wedding on a Kool-Aid budget, or battling for top billing in my guy’s life. It also helped that I’d already helped plan two weddings and attended dozens more, and that I’d read up a lot on the subject. I knew what was expected of me, what I wanted, and how to make it happen.
A lot of brides don’t have it nearly as easy as I did, but I’m still amazed at the expectation that stress and misery are the primary emotions involved in wedding planning. Surely I’m not the only person whose family is sane about these things? I can’t have been the only bride to feel that if I wasn’t enjoying the process, I must be doing it wrong and needed to alter my approach? If ‘every woman has dreamed of her wedding day since she was a little girl,’ is it really possible that none of the others ever thought to do any research on how it’s actually done? Is losing one’s mind absolutely de rigueur?
I still don’t think it is necessary to go insane to plan a wedding. Luckily I’ve found a couple people recently who seem to agree with me.
Leslie Stratton Hughes writes the bridal blog Getting Married From the Inside Out. Her entire blog is on just this subject. In a recent article she wrote:
Lets push aside this idea that wedding planning must be a nightmare turning the majority of brides into emotional wrecks unable to remember huge chunks of their day as the wedding nerves grip and take over completely. Why do people settle for that?
Why indeed?
If you’re feeling the need of someone to tell you it’s okay not to stress over your wedding or a bit of advice on how to have the wedding you’d like without losing your mind in the process, go and read a couple of her articles on having an ‘authentic’ wedding.
And for those of a slightly more cynical turn of mind, this extremely saltily-phrased article may also be of interest. The gentleman in question is very hard on those who choose extravagance, even if they can afford it, and some of the language could easily have been toned down a tidge. Still, he has a good point at bottom: too much of wedding stress is self-imposed. If you refuse to lose your mind over shades of ribbon or whether Uncle LeRoy wears a tux or an ordinary suit, then you can relax and enjoy the day a lot more.
Yes, there are those dealing with serious family disapproval, warring divorced parents, time schedules made insanely short because a family member in the military is about to be deployed somewhere dangerous, and other actual stressors…but maybe it’s time for the rest of us to find the fun in wedding planning again.
Thankfully, I have a very good relationship with my mother and my mother has very good taste. Her best friend is also a retired professional event planner. I planned the ceremony myself, but handed them a very basic sketch of what I wanted the reception to be like and let them have at it. They seem to have had a lot of fun, and I didn’t have to worry about what color table cloths to get and whether to serve beer or not–I just want people to have fun at the reception, to dance, and have some good food.
So, I have not really been stressed about the wedding planning, until now. Now, with a mere five weeks to go, all kinds of people are not cooperating. The kilt maker finally sent my fiancé and his father their kilts, but the jackets and sporrans haven’t come in (easy to rent, sure, but it’s annoying to rent when you’ve already paid for your own tailor-made jacket). My fiancé’s favorite cousin, who had verbally agreed to be an usher back in May, has sent back the invitation response card marked “Regrets” with no explanation of why he isn’t coming. Only one of the five guys I asked to be altar servers has emailed me back (three weeks later). It’s getting difficult to remain calm.
I was lucky not to have gotten that response. I would have been bummed.
And if anything, my husband was a wee bit TOO involved, if you ask me.
LOL my manager at work asked me why I wasn’t flipping out dealing with all the wedding planning 🙂 My fiance & I worked hard to de-stress the wedding, even to the point of promising each other that we wouldn’t freak out! I think going into planning your wedding with realistic ideas and not getting sucked into the “wedding industry” idea of what the day should be.
Thanks for the mention! I don’t know how you found me but I’m glad you did because even though we are thousands of miles away we are coming from the exact same place.
I will just say, though, my blog is also about preparing emotionally and psychologically to get married, which in the UK gets overlooked almost completely. In my book, this is the key to being able to deal with things effectively, with clarity of mind and room for creativity. I don’t for a minute believe that wedding planning is the real villain here!
You’re welcome, Lesley! I stumbled across your blog a few days ago and thought your advice was so sensible that I needed to spread the word a little bit.
Emotional and psychological preparedness often gets short shrift on this side of the Pond, too.
Sheesh if I had 37,000 dollars to spend I could have a stress free wedding, too.
Having enough money to do more or less as you please can certainly make life easier, Tizzy, but I don’t think it’s the whole story by a longshot. I had a grand total of two thousand dollars to work with, and yet I was probably the calmest bride I’ve ever known.
I think it really has a lot more to do with expectations, understanding of the process, and finding ways to go about planning that fit your personality than what sort of budget you have to work with.
I so agree. And it’s funny, planning my wedding was ridiculously stressful, but we weren’t the cause of any of the stress. My parents and inlaws were great and really supportive, and we had very few things that we really cared about… it’s just that our plans kept falling through. The only caterer for our original reception location tried to rip us off. There was an arson at our church. The restaurant we chose as an alternate reception location decided that the banquet room wouldn’t be available after all. And on and on. The end result was that 7 weeks before our wedding, we changed the date from Saturday to Sunday, and suddenly all our plans clicked into place. It was great. Very low stress.