Trigger Warning: If you suffer from an eating disorder, you might want to skip this one. It could be detrimental to your recovery.

So. Dieting to fit into your wedding gown. Can we talk about this for a minute?

Since I write a wedding planning blog, I do see a lot of articles about how best to lose those unwanted pounds, because really, who wants to be fat on her wedding day? At least, the common assumption is that you want to lose weight for your wedding. In fact, I remember having several people tell me when I got engaged that there are two things every bride in the world does: grows her hair out and goes on a diet.
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Back when this happy couple got married, there wasn’t a lot of question about how they would be addressed socially or professionally in the aftermath. The bride would take the groom’s name, period.

Sure a few famous women – mostly movie stars and novelists – might continue to use their birth names professionally, but for most women marriage spelled the end of any professional life that might require continuity of address. She might get a job, particularly once the children were in school, but she wouldn’t have a profession. And even if she did have a profession, her professional identity would change to suit her social one.

Today, though, there are a lot more options. You can follow the traditional form. You can hyphenate. You can simply go by the names you used before you got married. You can both change to something completely new. You can go socially by your husband’s name and professionally by your birth name. I even knew one woman who kept her own name socially but used her husband’s professionally. She was a kindergarten teacher and the kids found his last name easier to pronounce than hers.

The decision, as I have said many times before, is entirely up to the two people getting married. Whether you’re a traditionalist or a same-sex couple that can’t abide the idea of one of you being the ‘bride’ and one the ‘groom’ no matter your gender and feelings about your names, though, one thing is for sure: today you cannot assume that everyone will know what choice you have made.

So how do you get the information across to your entire social circle?
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We all know that planning a wedding often runs to money. In fact, for many of us our wedding will be the largest, most complex party we ever throw.

We also all know there are ways of cutting the budget that make a lot of sense… but what about the ones that don’t seem that sensible on the surface? Every once in a while, it turns out the way that looked the most cost-effective isn’t.

Here are a couple ideas you may not think would save you money, but really can if applied thoughtfully as well as a couple cost-saving measures that may not really save you very much at all.
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(Illustration via Wedding Dress Online)

The other day on the Huffington Post wedding page, in the Ask Amsale column, a bride asked what to do if she doesn’t look good in white.

Amsale tells the bride to look into a gown in ivory, blush, caffe, or champagne.

Those are all good suggestions… as far as they go. But there’s an important thing to keep in mind: what color you wear makes no difference to the legality or spiritual significance of your wedding, or the commitment you feel in your marriage. White or a neutral color is not required to be a bride.

So pick a color you like, look and feel good in. You are still a bride whether you wear white, pink, bright orange, ice blue, kelly green, or purple like the woman in the photo at top of this article. My own beloved mother wore scarlet from head to toe – including her stockings! – at her 1959 wedding to my father. When she died more than thirty years later, they were still in love.

That’s the part that matters. Not what color the dress is.

Do you know what can happen if you go about proposing the wrong way to your lady?

According to R.J. Licata, the dangers include:

- Marrying the wrong girl
- Waiting too long/Proposing too soon
- Buying the wrong ring
- Overspending on the ring
- Being uninformed
- Overlooking an important detail
- Ruining the surprise
- Destroying your nerves
- Letting her down

I think about the only thing he left out was the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Oh, wait! That was a dandruff shampoo commercial in the seventies. My bad.

But Licata has the answer! He has written the book he wishes had existed before he proposed marriage. You know, the one that would have stopped him marrying the wrong girl. Or maybe it was that he was uninformed… or maybe he let her down. It’s hard to tell.
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When it comes to planning a wedding, everyone has an opinion.

You may be one of the lucky ones who doesn’t get a lot of unsolicited advice or unreasonable demands from friends and family… but what if you’re not so lucky? Who has what rights in these questions? What can you do about it?
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There are a lot of guides out on the web, on television, in books, etc. on how to avoid wedding disasters. Goodness knows the subject has come up once or seventeen times here!

But one thing I have noticed is that a lot of these guides aren’t really talking about serious disasters. They’re talking about minor to middling snafus that truly can be planned for and dealt with. And even then, some of them are full of questionable advice.
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