Five Things I’ve Learned Whilst Planning My Wedding


**That’s me on the left. This photo pretty much sums up how excited I am that the wedding is finally! almost! here!**

1) That I do, in fact, discriminate.

People have been asking me what our “colors” are and about six months ago I was so over trying to actually answer this question and so I started saying “I don’t discriminate,” which has gotten me nothing but confused looks but it cracks me up every time so I keep saying it but then yesterday I realized that I do, in fact, discriminate, as we have no pink or purple in our wedding. Aqua, yes. Sunflower, yes. Peacock blue, clover, red, about five shades of orange, yes. But no pink or purple. I am color-prejudiced! Who knew?

2) That my marriage is not your marriage. 

Marriage is one of the most intensely personal journeys imaginable and is also incredibly universal. Everyone has their own ideas about what it means, and what it should look like and how to “do it right” that they are more than happy to share with you. As soon as we were engaged, very well-meaning people came out of the woodwork and began unpacking their ideas about what our wedding and marriage HAD to look like – many of which quite frankly terrified me.

This pressure got to me for a few months until one day it hit me that duh, this is just like every other stage I’ll cross in life. People will judge and will think I’m doing it all wrong and it just really doesn’t matter. Our marriage is just our relationship – no one is going to kidnap me after the wedding and pour me into some scary wife-mold.

Instead we made a point to use these kinds of statements and expectations as discussion points to unpack what we DO want our marriage to look like – what our expectations are, what if anything we think will change…these conversations have been the best part of planning our wedding.

3) That “for the wedding” is a magical phrase.

Let’s look at the following scenario.

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Me: Well I can’t really come to the bar because I was planning on making a cake stand with this platter I found at the thrift store.
Other person: ….. Um. Okay.
Me: Sigh.

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Me: Well I can’t really come to the bar because I was planning on making a cake stand for the wedding with this platter I found at the thrift store.
Other person: Wow that’s so cool!! How much fun!
Me: I KNOW, RIGHT!?!?!

4) That the details matter, except for when they don’t.

Planning a wedding has been a hilarious clash of various aspects of my personality. On the one hand, we have my artist side who is rather obsessed with aesthetics and has very strong opinions on how things should go but not match and takes immense delight in creating and stumbling upon beautiful vignettes and feels strongly that the little things in life should be noticed and relished.

And on the other we have my…well….lazy very, very laid-back bohemian side, which basically says who cares what color the linens are? We’d rather be at the beach than meeting with any vendors… and anyways the party will happen because our friends and family are a blast, we’ll be blissful and surrounded by so much love, we’ll end up married and nothing else matters very much.

And then! bringing up the rear – my total Type-A side, which loves lists and crossing things off of them (why yes, you can be lazy and neurotic all at the same time – it’s a great way to drive yourself slowly crazy), who makes lists of lists and has about 3,490 google documents and is still pretty sure 2 weeks out that there’s a bunch of things she’s forgetting (this is the side that regularly emails Steve things like “WHO IS PICKING UP THE CAKES!?!?!!”).

Then you throw my lovely partner into the mix. I cannot stress enough how incredibly involved Steve has been through this whole process (especially in the making-things-happen arena), but he pretty much cares about three things and three things only:

Me, at the very beginning of planning: What are your priorities for the wedding?
Steve: (short pause) Good food, lots of alcohol, great music.
Me: Succinct! Nothing else?
Steve: I also want a really cool ring and to go somewhere awesome for the honeymoon and to finally be married to you.
Me: Fair enough, dude.

So we pretty much planned the wedding backwards (at least, backwards according to the migraine-inducing knot.com, which, I kid you not, insisted that I should have figured out how I was going to wear my hair SIX MONTHS OUT or I would be VERY VERY BEHIND), wherein we focused on the things that we decided really DID matter to us (a ceremony that was deeply personal / creating a warm and intimate atmosphere for our guests / spending quality time with our friends and family / good food / a great dance party / killer photography) and didn’t really worry about the details, and then the perfect details sort of just appeared along the way as I was going about my life and I was like hey, thanks life! or they didn’t and we were like ehhh who needs that anyways and now we have a vaguely cohesive event planned and no idea how that really happened….ta-da!

5) That this is exactly right.

Exactly.