Planning and throwing a wedding is a stressful thing to do.

You’re making a major life change and throwing what will mostly likely be the biggest, most elaborate party of your life, and doing both while navigating huge, conflicting expectations from the most important people in your life.

No wonder a lot of brides have meltdowns and so many grooms shy away from doing more than saying ‘yes, dear’ in the planning stages!

Nevertheless, it is actually possible to reduce the stress involved and even have a really good time planning and attending your own wedding. And as it would happen, I have a few suggestions.
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This is the gypsy matchmaker from The Sims 2. Give her enough money, and she’ll find your Sim a life partner to make him or her happy. If you don’t have the simoleans for that, though, you can purchase a vial of Love Potion 8.5 to give your Sim a leg up in any potentially romantic situation.

But if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’ve already found that certain, special someone. What you need is a little help finding the right vendors to make your day everything you’ve dreamed of.

OneWed.com has been helping couples find those vendors for some time now, but they’ve just launched an intriguing new free Matchmaker function called MatchMake.

You simply answer a set of questions about your wedding as regards the aspect you’re looking for help in (venue, catering, photography, transportation, etc.), and it pops out a list of vendors that best match your needs.

For instance, last night I sat down and played with the venue selection to see what I came up with. I gave them some real challenges (venues that feature purple, outdoor museum space, room for 150 for $500 or less) and they managed to come through with some options that – while not exact – did feature a fair number of the aspects I asked for. And I did some runs on the catering options, too, with similar results.

I really appreciated the fact that the questions included some fairly non-traditional options in the answer pool. For one thing, the religious affiliation question included the options of ‘atheist’ ‘Pastafarian’ and ‘Scientologist’ as well as more traditional possibilities such as ‘Catholic’ ‘Jewish’ or ‘Hindu’. Also, you could choose up to three. Options for the mood of your venue included things like ‘quirky’ as well as ‘romantic.’

All in all, I found this an encouraging place to look for the right vendors when you don’t know where to start.

The downside? Well, thus far it only shows vendors for the New York and Chicago areas. Bummer for those of you getting married in Maine or Texas. Still, as I said, this is a new program. I fully expect it to expand.

In the meantime, the site as a whole is brimming over with inspiration and options for the rest of us, including lists of local vendors in all walks of wedding planning, complete with user reviews. It just doesn’t weed out the ones that won’t work for you at all. Yet.

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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(Illustration via Delightfully Engaged)
If you listen to conventional wisdom, you’ll learn that you won’t remember a single moment of your wedding. It will all be a blur. And that is true for some brides. I’ve known several of them myself. I’ve known women who spent the entire day in a fog, or in tears, or stressing out over minute details nobody else noticed who missed their entire weddings.

Me? I wasn’t like that. I’ve known a lot of other brides who were more like me. They spent their wedding days really at their weddings and remember them clearly years later.

You may simply be the sort of person who gets caught up in emotions and forgets the details. It happens. But if your fog or forgetfulness springs from another source, there are ways to get more in touch with the moment and truly enjoy yourself at your wedding.
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Meet Kristen-Alexander Griffith. He’s an actor. He’s living in New York. He’s engaged. And he’s gay.

Since they got engaged in November, he and his partner, Aaron VanderYacht, have been finding they have a lot of questions about getting married as gay men. Naturally, they turned to the internet.

One frustrating Google search later, they had found a certain number of wedding-related services run by heterosexuals featuring rainbow flags that assured them they were welcome as customers, which was fine… as far as it went. What they couldn’t find was practical advice on how to throw a wedding with two grooms and zero brides.

So what do two guys looking for answers and not finding them do? They create the resource they’re looking for themselves. And so they started The Best Gay Wedding Blog Ever to document their wedding planning over the next year. As Kristen-Alexander says in his inaugural entry, dated January 10:

I thought it was time to hear stories and advice straight from the horse’s mouth, that horse being your’s truly!! So over the next, I dunno, year or so you and I will go on a journey. A journey to the big day: our wedding. I will share with you all the juicy experiences as my lovely groom and I try to figure out how the hell we are going to pull of a fabulous wedding on a budget. I am sure this experience will be full of hilarious stories, tears of joy, tragic tuxedos and terrible wedding cake! But best believe, by the time we are done you and your future Mr. or Mrs. will certainly know one thing: What not to do when planning your wedding!

All I can say is, I look forward to seeing what decisions messers Griffith and VanderYacht make.

2012 is just around the corner, and that means that the experts are lining up to tell us what’s hot and what’s not for the coming year. I’ve browsed a few of these lists. Some of them contradict one another, but after looking over dozens of guesses, I’m seeing some pretty clear clues to what’s coming in the next few months. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Dessert tables are expected to continue to be a big deal in weddings. Variety is the spice of life, and a wonderful way to end a reception meal.

A further wrinkle on this trend that’s on the rise for parties that last late into the night is a second spread of snacks offered to guests on their way out. Doughnuts, cookies, sliders, coffee and cocoa… this is the chance to offer up a tasty final gift to your guests.
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When you announce you’re getting married, everyone has expectations. You have expectations, your parents have expectations, sisters, cousins, aunts, co-workers, and random strangers on the street have expectations. Vendors certainly have expectations, as do officiants.

But the fact of the matter is that 98.735% of all of those expectations are based on what is typically done, not on what’s required. The actual legal requirements of getting married here in the USA are pretty minimalist. They’ve even decreased in the years since Mr. Twistie and I tied the knot. When we got married, California still required blood tests. Now most states have dropped that requirement. Several have opened their legal arms to same-sex couples. More will no doubt follow.

And when it comes to religious requirements, well, the vast majority of those are concerned entirely with the marriage ceremony itself. Several faiths do require premarital counseling, and a couple have requirements that may affect your menu. Still, most faiths are more concerned with the wording of the ceremony than the activities at the reception.

When you get right down to it, everything from the bride dressing in white to the tossing of the bouquet and garter, to carrying flowers, to going on a honeymoon afterwards is a matter of tradition or fashion. It’s not written in stone.

That means if you want to wear an unexpected color, like this light green Vera Wang gown from her 2012 collection:

… you’re perfectly free to do so.
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