Don’t Look At Wedding Planning As an Excuse to Overspend
Weddings expensive? And how. But that doesn’t mean you have to toss your budget out the window to have a great ceremony and reception. Prioritizing is one way to get the things you really want while conveniently ignoring all of the ads telling you that you must have X, Y, or Z. And as tempting as it is to put wedding expenses on your credit card or take out a loan, spend the money you have, not the money you wish you had.
Don’t Let Wedding Planning Become Your Life
Weddings get more and more stressful when you spend less and less time doing the things you love. If you want to plan your wedding 24/7 because you love event planning and you’re good at it, fab. But if you hate putting together even a tiny party, it’s time to delegate wedding planning tasks and figure out where you can cut out all those unnecessary to-dos that are giving you a stress headache. Favors? Don’t need ’em. Fancy menus? Ditto. And so on, and so forth.
Don’t Assume ‘It’s Not a Wedding Without X’
I think we do a pretty good job here at Manolo for the Brides of letting brides- and grooms-to-be know that so many wedding must-haves are optional. Magazines, on the other hand, frequently do not. According to the glossies, you absolutely need, say, some form of post-wedding transportation beyond your car or you’re going to regret it. And if you can’t afford it? You’ll just have to figure out a way, because you don’t want to look back on yooouuuurrrr daaayyyyyyy for the rest of your life with a sign because you didn’t spring for the best of all things (even when you couldn’t care less about said things).
Don’t Equate Weddings and Marriage
Everyone knows that girl, the one who isn’t even seeing anyone but is mentally planning a wedding that will go down once she locates a suitable groom. Bleah. Weddings are fun. We love weddings big time freaky here, but we also are the first to admit that the brides and grooms who go to city hall are just as married as the brides and grooms who drop mega bucks on weekend-long wedding receptions. Don’t let anyone tell you that your union is doomed because you only have $1,500 to spend on your wedding – you know, because you’d rather drop the rest of your savings on a house or six months of world travel or something similarly frivolous.
Don’t Believe Everything You Read
Most weddings cost $30,000, right? Wrong. Weddings can cost anywhere from $50 for a license and city hall ceremony to $100,000 or more for your insane-o deluxe package. The $30k figure is just one of those things that keeps getting drilled into the heads of brides-to-be who are already emotionally invested in their weddings and don’t want to underspend and be judged for it. Do some weddings cost $30,000? Of course? Do most of them? If the reader comments I’ve read over the years are any indication, a lot of y’all have spent a lot less.
Don’t Sacrifice Fun for Image
Weddings can certainly be extremely elegant affairs, but they certainly don’t have to be. Do we see a lot of photos of evening weddings featuring black ties and tapers and grand pianos and fancy starters? Sure, but we also see plenty of photos of weddings with DIY photo booths featuring fun props, balloons and bubbles, karaoke, carnival games, and other silly stuff. So don’t feel like your wedding has to be way formal if that’s not who you are.
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
Something always goes wrong before weddings and at weddings. Maybe it’s something small, like the bridesmaids’ dresses you really love being discontinued a week before you tried to place an order. Maybe it’s something huge like a death in the family a week before the wedding. There’s no such thing as a perfect wedding, unless you make an effort to find beauty in imperfection. A relative passing? That’s big stuff, and it’s totally reasonable to fall apart. But when the thing that goes wrong is easily fixed or hardly noticeable, brush it off and move on. Bridezillas are made, not born, but they make themselves. In other words, chill, baby.