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.

1: Know your planning style. I’m not talking about colors or level of formality here, but how you best handle making plans. Are you a hands-on or a hands-off kind of person? What about your intended? If one of you wants a finger in every pie and the other wants to be told where to show up and when, then go with that, even if the roles chosen are not gender-traditional.

If you both want to have your hands all over it, choose who takes lead in each area and offer one another options you’ve winnowed down in advance.

If neither of you wants to handle the big stuff, hire someone to do it for you. They’re called wedding planners, and they can take care of stuff for you if you aren’t well organized or if you honestly don’t care very much about the details, or even if you know what you want but don’t know how to go about getting it.

There’s no right or wrong here. There is only what works for you as a couple. Don’t fight your essential nature, but use it.

2: Don’t hire any vendor you don’t trust. It doesn’t matter if the florist you’re looking at fits your budget and has a long list of glowing reviews on Yelp. You took one look and didn’t trust her to come through. At that point, it doesn’t matter whether your gut is right or wrong. You still won’t feel comfortable working with this person and that means you won’t be able to relax about the bouquets and centerpieces. That adds unnecessary stress. Find someone else to do the job.

3: If someone offers money, find out what the strings attached are before you say yes. It’s awfully rare for someone to give you a large sum of cash without expecting something in return for it… or at least a very large say in how it’s spent. Know what their expectations are before you accept the offer. After all, it’s sweet of your future in-laws to offer to pay for the catering, but they may then believe they have the final say in the menu. That may be fine with you, and if so, go for it! On the other hand, if their menu choices mean you won’t be able to eat the food at your own wedding, thank them for their generosity and then let them know you’ve made other arrangements… then make those arrangements as quickly as you can!

4: Take breaks from wedding planning. Whether your timeline is a year or a week, make sure you don’t spend every moment breathing wedding plans. Spend time doing things that aren’t wedding-related, follow other interests, remember that there’s a whole world of things that have nothing to do with orders of service, stationery, or threatening the DJ with a hideous death should he dare to play the Electric Slide.

A lot of women have talked about feeling like they fell off the edge of a cliff after their weddings. This feeling is a lot less prevalent in brides (and grooms) who don’t fixate too intensely on wedding planning.

So take in a movie, go for a run, read about a topic that interests you, angle for that promotion at work, take a class or take some time to indulge in your favorite hobby. Not only will it help keep the wedding in perspective, your friends will enjoy your company more if you have something other than tulle and flower girls to talk about.

5: Know that something will go wrong. Trust me, something always does. It isn’t always a big thing, by any means, but it will happen. Whether it’s noisy latecomers, a lost bouquet, a sudden failure of the sound system, a slightly tipsy guest making an embarrassing speech, or the delivery of the wrong cake, it’s only a disaster if you make it one. Accepting that something will be imperfect makes it a lot easier to deal with and make the best of that imperfection.

By the way, every single one of these things happened to someone whose wedding I attended. The only one that turned into a disaster was the lost throwing bouquet. The bride in that case held up the entire reception for an hour while the bouquet was sought out and brought to her. Seriously. And she threw tantrums while we all waited for the reception to begin.

The lady who received the wrong cake? She took it in stride. She decided that since it would feed all her guests, fit into her color scheme that included gold, and was originally meant for someone else’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, she would take it as a good omen for her marriage.

Nobody noticed anything wasn’t as it was intended to be.

Oh, and those noisy late arrivals at my wedding? No biggie. We all had a good laugh and went on with the ceremony. My guess is that most of the guests have long forgotten that incident. What they remember is a fun party with plenty of food and drink to go around in a pretty place. And even if they do remember that sudden cry of ‘we heard there was a wedding somewhere around here’ they probably still giggle a little as it… as do I.

6: Take care of your physical health in the weeks leading up to your wedding. Sure, getting married can take a lot of work. And there are always going to be some jitters involved when making such a huge, life-changing step. All the same, you can make it easier on your nerves and your immune system if you do your best to take care of your body.

So do your best to get enough to eat and focus on nutritionally dense foods. Take moderate exercise of a sort that’s appropriate to your ability level and feels good mentally, too. Aim for eight hours of sleep each night. Not only will you relax more, you’ll glow in your wedding photos!

7: Think about your guest’s comfort. Take the focus off yourself here and there and really consider what will keep your guests happy. Take the time to decide whether the chairs feel good to sit in, whether there are enough bathroom facilities, and what you can do to provide shade and air circulation on a very hot day.

When you spend time considering the needs and comfort of others, funnily enough, you take a lot of stress off yourself… and those little things you do to take care of other peoples’ comfort also help you have a comfortable time.

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.

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?

Time was, and not so long ago in historical terms, when the groom’s entire job was to show up on time in appropriate clothes and say ‘I do.’ And the brides’ job was to allow her parents to give the party they wanted in the style that best displayed any wealth they had. Two brides or two grooms was unheard of.

The wedding as an expression of the happy couples’ personal aesthetic vision is a relatively new concept, and there are a lot of people who haven’t caught up with it yet. Your parents may feel that it’s still their job to plan your wedding for you, especially if they’re footing the bill.

The thing is, if they’re paying for it, it does give a lot more weight to their arguments. It’s hard to convince people to pay for things they don’t approve of. It’s hard to convince them to pay for things they wouldn’t choose for themselves. If your priorities and tastes are very different from theirs, you could wind up butting heads over the most seemingly ridiculous things.

Chances are, though, that if you’re spending a lot of time arguing about flowers or whether to have a vegetarian entree option, at least part of what you’re really arguing about is the question of who’s in charge.

And that’s where things get tricky.

There are lucky couples out there who are handed wads of cash by parents with no strings attached. If that’s your case, have at it and enjoy!

But most people who give money to a couple want some form of control over how it’s spent. That means that if you’re offered money, you have to decide whether you can live with the strings attached.

It might be that your parents will pay for your gown as long as it’s within the budget they’ve offered. Or it might be that they will pay for it as long as it’s pure white and covered to the chin. Your soon-to-be in-laws might be willing to pay for all the flowers, no holds barred. Or they might be willing to pay for only flowers they don’t associate with something negative or only if they’re fake. Your grandmother might want to pay for the venue, no matter what it might be… or she might insist you hold the wedding at her church and the reception in the basement where you’re not allowed to serve alcohol.

If you’re getting money from someone who wants you to choose what they would choose for you, you need to decide first if it’s what you would choose for yourself. If you, too, prefer faux flowers or didn’t plan to serve alcohol, anyway, those strings won’t be a problem. Take the money and run.

But what if you have your heart set on a rum pink strapless gown? A hall filled with the lilies your MIL associates with funerals, or an open bar and a country club setting?

Well, you can discuss the matter with the person holding the purse strings. Sometimes a bit of gentle persuasion will result in a compromise that will satisfy everyone. You might even be able to get your own way entirely, if the person is willing to listen carefully and you are able to articulate your desires eloquently.

But if they won’t budge, then you have a decision to make: can you find a way to have your wedding without their money? Can you live with having the wedding they prefer you to have? How much emotional fallout will there be if you simply refuse the money?

In a perfect world, you would be able to have precisely the wedding you’d most like to have with the full support of your family and friends… but this world isn’t perfect. Nobody gets their own way every time. Sometimes the price of getting your way is higher than you want to pay. And sometimes we all need to put someone else’s priorities higher than our own.

Ultimately, the decision is yours. You get to decide whose priorities are most important and why. Even if you choose someone else’s preference, it’s up to you.

You’re in charge.

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.

Plan the day in a way that makes you comfortable. It’s easy to get caught up in what’s expected or listen to someone else tell you what makes them relax. For instance, a lot of guides will tell you to make sure you have nothing whatsoever to do on your wedding day other than get married. For some, that’s great advice. For others, it’s a one-way ticket to nerves and stress. I helped make salads and set up the site on my wedding day, and I wouldn’t do it any other way. I’d have gone bonkers with nothing to do with my hands.

So think about whether doing something practical that day will relax or stress you. Think about whether having someone do your hair and make up for you will make you feel confident or drive you up a tree. Will having the photographer there while you’re dressing make you uncomfortable? Nix it if it will!

You’re an individual. Your stressors may be very different from another person’s. Work around who you really are. Don’t make yourself more stressed than you need to be.

Consider doing formal portraits before the ceremony or after the honeymoon. Mr. Twistie and I had all our formal photos taken before we went to the altar, and I would do it that way again. In China, some couples have their wedding portraits taken up to a year in advance. Still other couples have found it practical to hire a photographer to do candids at the wedding itself, but save up the formal portraits for after the honeymoon. Yet others will take all the formal shots that don’t require both the bride and groom in the shot before the ceremony, and the few remaining ones afterwards.

Any of these scenarios means less of a gap between the time the couple ties the knot and the time they arrive at their own shindig. That means earlier access to food, fun, and your guests.

Have a receiving line. I know a lot of people think this is stuffy, old fashioned, and for the birds, but I still think it’s worth doing. Why? Because it means you don’t miss greeting anyone, and you don’t spend the dinner hour missing the food because you’re hopping from table to table and then tracking down stragglers. If you’re having more than fifty people at your wedding, a receiving line just makes things easier.

Then once the line is done with, you can relax and concentrate on interacting with your guests rather than calculating who you’ve missed saying hello to. You can get the meal you paid for instead of getting two bites before you have to race off and talk to someone you missed. And eating your meal? Helps you keep from getting light headed from hunger. It also helps you keep the alcohol from hitting extra hard on an empty stomach. All these things help keep you in the moment.

Ditch any traditions you don’t care about. Reading over a typical wedding reception timeline can leave you thinking you’ll spend the day running from one photo op to the next with no chance to catch your breath. Funnily enough, most of those traditions and photo ops are entirely optional. If any of them make you uncomfortable, annoy you, or just seem like too much trouble, you are perfectly free to not do them. If there’s something you’d rather do, like hire some belly dancers or a magician to perform, there’s no law against having them. Do what seems like fun to you.

Organize as much as you can in advance, and then put it into someone else’s hands on the day. One of the things that relaxed me the most in the days leading up to my wedding was the fact that I’d crossed my i’s and dotted my t’s and had all the paperwork at my fingertips. When you know you’ve done what you can to make things smooth, it’s easier to believe that it will go reasonably smoothly.

Of course, something will go wrong. It’s the nature of life. So on the big day, have someone deputized to handle all crises and make sure everyone knows who that is. Don’t try to handle every little detail that goes wonky yourself. Go play with your guests and let your assigned deputy – whether that’s a bridesmaid, a relative, or a hired day-of coordinator – deal with missing flowers, the ring bearer’s stage fright, and Great Aunt Beatrice’s dislike of the choice of processional music. You don’t need to deal with those things in the middle of your wedding.

Speaking of things going wrong, remind yourself regularly that perfect isn’t going to happen. If you’re comfortable with the fact that something will go wrong, chances are you’ll deal with it more rationally when something does go wrong.

Whether it’s something small like a bridesmaid in sudden need of an aspirin, or something big like finding the bakery delivered the wrong cake (That actually happened to a friend of mine! But since she was ready for something to go wrong, she decided that the gold frosting fit her color scheme and that the fact it was a fiftieth anniversary cake that would feed her entire guest list was a good omen), if you’re aware it’s coming, you can roll with the punches better. So keep your head and your sense of humor. It will relax you and help you stay in the moment.

While planning things, make sure you take time out to do non-wedding-related things, too. It’s easy to get so focused on menus and seating arrangements and choosing just the right readings for the ceremony that you forget to live your life in the meantime. But if you take time to see movies, go bowling, take night classes, and just hang out with friends, it’s a lot harder to get so completely obsessed that you lose sight of the bigger picture. Sure, your wedding is important. It’s a major life-changing event. It deserves its due importance… but it isn’t everything.

Remember to make time for the other things in your life. It helps keep things in perspective.

When you’re at your wedding, be at your wedding. You’ll have a better time and remember things the photographer didn’t happen to catch with the camera.

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.

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.


Alternatives to flowers are another trend on the rise. Paper, brooches, fabric, feathers… if it can substitute for flowers, someone’s using it. This is a great trend if you’re dealing with allergies or want to DIY your bouquets and centerpieces over time. But real flowers are hardly going anywhere.

More brides have been doing DIY projects for their weddings, and that isn’t changing anytime soon. Whether it’s to save money, add uniquely personal touches, or honor a family tradition, using your own hands to put at least a couple pieces of your wedding together can be tremendously satisfying.

Green is clearly the way to go in the coming year. From invitations of recycled paper to living plant centerpieces, to packets of wildflower seeds as favors, brides and grooms everywhere are getting eco-friendly and loving it.

More weddings than ever are happening in the great outdoors. Whether it’s a garden, a beach, the woods, couples are choosing the sky as the ceiling they prefer. As someone who had an outdoor wedding and loved it, I say go for it… just make sure you have a backup plan in case of inclement weather.

Of course trends are fun, but never follow one if it feels wrong to you. You should do what matters to you.

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.

You can also go short, like this imaginative piece by Etsy artist lizarietz:

or if you want to wear pants:

That’s fine, too.

And that goes for venues, menus, flowers or substitutes for them, seating arrangements, linens, transportation, and the make up of your wedding party.

If you can imagine it, chances are someone is providing it somewhere. If they aren’t… maybe you should think about whether it’s a good idea to provide it to the world yourself.

When the possibilities are endless, you can let your imagination soar until you find precisely what will make you happy. Fly, my pretties! It’s well worth the trouble.

What comes next? People are starting to complain! How did I even get here?

Brides lucky enough to have a full-time planner handling the big day deets and those who’ve hired wedding day coordinators can stop reading because they don’t have to worry about who needs to be where when. The rest of us? Need a plan. And that plan is the wedding day timeline – not to be confused with the wedding planning timeline – a list of happenings, times, and possibly people that gives you a general outline of how the wedding day will play out.

While some couples play it fast and loose with the wedding day timeline, some wedding day timelines are broken down in five minute increments. Especially during the reception when you may be moving from first dance to father-daughter dance to mother-son dance to dinnertime pretty quickly. This will help you and your wedding party keep it together, of course, but it will also be helpful for your mc so she or he doesn’t miss any cues.

Why do so many people forget about the wedding day timeline? Probably because we do – and by we, I mean wedding experts. We get so immersed in the planning side of things that we forget that the planning is leading up to an actual event that also needs attention. So that’s my tip: Make sure that you either make yourself a wedding day timeline spreadsheet in advance of the big day or choose a wedding planning workbook (like the Ultimate Wedding Workbook) that includes one!

Wedding lighting design for ceremonies

Lighting is THE single most important visual element in your wedding. More so than flowers, decor, or even architecture and space. Yet, with all of its critical nature, so many brides, and even wedding planners, don’t consider lighting or budget for it at all. If so, it is often looked at as an addendum to the wedding decor budget.

With lighting setting the mood, it should be considered first and foremost once a space is chosen. Here’s why: One can transform any space with light, but one can only augment with flowers or decor.

On the practical side, there are three things that need to be managed when executing a lighting design for weddings:

• The room needs to look beautiful
• The guests have to feel good
• Lastly, the guests, especially the bride, have to FEEL good

Lighting design for receptions, too

So in support of that, here are five things to look for when lighting a wedding:

1. Symmetry - Light everything evenly so that the room looks symmetrical.

2. Intensity - Dim the lights a little less than you think you should. Your eye adjusts to the lower light and it creates so much more atmosphere than you’d ever imagine. Which brings me to my next point:

3. Levels - Dim absolutely everything. Having the ability to dim the lights when the grandparents go home and set the mood for the kids is a pretty important thing to be able to do.

4. Color - Soft beautiful flattering colors (pinks, ambers, honeys and apricots) should be used wherever people are. While we love blue and green to look at, and we often want to go bolder with color, those colors make our skin tones sallow and pasty.

5. Angles - Be super sensitive to light in peoples’ eyes by angling things as vertically as possible. If your grandmother has a light shining in her eyes all night, chances are she’ll go home before the cake cutting.

There is also a 6th consideration, namely your lighting designer. Since lighting is often mysterious and unknown, and the bride and her family are often unable to see the full picture prior to their walking in, (decor, catering, etc. will not yet have been set up) it is very important that your lighting designer really get you and who you are. That’s personality driven and I think it should be considered right alongside talents and portfolios as a critical criteria.

~Bentley Meeker

Are you a wedding vendor who has some insight to share with brides-to-be and grooms-to-be? Send me an email to talk about the possibility of guest posting right here!

Skip the stress by fudging your internal deadline

Here’s a wonderful antidote to wedding day stress that came up in a recent Brides.com post: Pretend your wedding is on a Wednesday. In other words, check off as many wedding planning to-dos before the Wednesday that’s before your wedding. Do the things that most brides and grooms do on Thursdays and Fridays before Saturday weddings on Mondays and Tuesdays. It’s probably one of the best wedding planning tips I’ve ever read. It’s the easiest way to make sure that on the night before your wedding, the only thing you have to worry about is getting a good night’s sleep.