EdwardMany brides have been fantasizing about their wedding since they were young girls. Maybe to start the process, they created a vision board or hinted to their partner. Some might not have contemplated it until now. Nevertheless, one doesn’t usually consider the emotional and mental strain that is sometimes associated with stages of wedding planning.
The consideration of the bride-to-be’s mental health is not one that typically arises throughout the wedding planning process. Yet, it would be wrong to overlook the inner journey that goes into this occasion—the true emotional stages to planning a wedding. If you have experienced planning your own wedding, you’ll resonate with the points highlighted in this article. If you haven’t planned a wedding yet, this is just a reminder that wedding planning isn’t always smooth sailing.
First Comes Uncontained Excitement
You just announced your engagement and everyone is thrilled! Your face hurts from all the smiling but you are too giddy to care. Wedding planning doesn’t stress you out, it only excites you! You find yourself endlessly staring at the sparkly ring on your left hand, something which doesn’t happen often. You’ve already taken a trip to the salon for your umpteenth visit to make sure your nails look primed and fresh all the time for all the engagement photos you’ve been taking. There’s no way to contain your blissful happiness!
Then Blissful Ignorance
It’s time to get down to business. You’re registered with Wedding Wire and you know how to navigate around the entire site. Your Pinterest account has inspiration ideas organized by folders, sub-folders and sub-sub folders.
All your colors have been picked out and you’ve already designed 2 versions of your Save the Date cards on Vistaprint. All you need to decide next is how many to print out based on the latest version of your guest list, which is nearing 400 because everyone you know needs to be at your wedding, right?
Your bridal party is now made up of all your best friends from high school and they’ve all accepted your one-of-a-kind bridesmaid proposals (thank you Pinterest!). They all happily follow you wedding dress shopping from one bridal salon to the next, gushing about which one you’ll “say yes” to. You’re as happy as you can possibly be and never without a glass of bubbly in your hand.
But Then Reality Sets In
Your Save the Date cards don’t come in the exact shade of blush that you’re looking for, not according to the Pantone Color Systems anyway. And your favorite invite design doesn’t have enough space to fit all the details you want printed. You have no other choice but to go to a custom printer which is going to set you back quite a bit of money.
You find out next that the venue of your dreams can only accommodate a seated capacity of 200, based on your request for rounds of 6. The only way you can get 400 guests to fit? Auditorium style and that’s not what you had in mind. On top of that, you forgot that you pinky swore with your first cousin twice removed back when you were 9 that you would be in each other’s bridal parties and she’s upset that you didn’t include her.
Dress shopping was a nightmare – you were expecting to quickly “say yes to the dress” and happily ring the bell, but it didn’t turn out that way. You looked at what felt like thousands of dresses and none of them were “the one”. To make it worse, you had dreams of walking down the aisle in a corseted fit and flare, only to realize that style of dress made you look like a stuffed sausage roll.
This is just the start… You go to your first few meetings with your vendors and you realize that your dream wedding will cost the same as a down payment on a house. Appetizers cost $5 a piece and the recommendation is 10 pieces per person. You quickly do the math and realize that $20,000 is a lot for appetizers and compare it to the cost of two years tuition when you were in university. To make it work, you start cutting down the guest list from 400 but you have no idea how to cute it down.
And this is just the start of it, when your internal temperature starts to rise and you’re at your wits end.
And You Start to Wonder
Your immediate thought is whether it makes sense to get married at all and the idea of eloping didn’t seem that crazy after all. You’re wondering if you made the right decisions, spent too much money on flowers or whether you needed a second photographer. You’re doubting whether you should have gone with the simpler ivory dress instead of the full crystal encrusted bodice that you insisted on getting.
At this point, your head is spinning and the wedding date is only a few months away. You’re wondering if every bride feels this way and whether you actually want or need to get married. And you talk to all those around you to make sure it’s not just you.
Which Makes You Freak Out Even More
You’ve got only a few weeks left before the wedding and there’s still so much left to do. You don’t have your first dance song picked out yet and the DJ wants to have it by end of day today. The caterer wants to confirm final list of dietary restrictions and whether you prefer American-style service or French-style service (there’s a difference??).
A few days out and guests start asking questions about the wedding. Can they bring a plus one? What’s the dress code? Are children allowed? Even though you were very specific and detailed in your invitations, the questions are still coming in and you want to scream.
It’s the day of the wedding and your dad shows up in the new suit you bought him for your wedding – but you can see that he’s wearing his favorite t-shirt underneath his suit. Your friend calls you from the car, crying because she forgot the cake pillars back home and she’s already close to the venue. She had to get her husband to follow her on the highway and he’s still not here yet. Your best man informs you that the marriage officiant is late because she can’t find parking and your maid of honor tells you that she forgot the wedding bands at home. On top of that, you hear from a bridesmaid that an uninvited guest can’t find his seat and he didn’t know that cargo pants weren’t acceptable attire. All while this is happening, your mom is still walking around without her makeup on and you still haven’t gotten dressed yet.
You try to take a deep breath but all of this is too much. Whose hairbrained idea was it to do this in the first place?
But There’s Always a Happy Ending
It’s go time and you only have 10 minutes left – there’s nothing else you can do about the cake or the guests. You’ve gotten the nod from your maid of honor that it’s go-time. You’re nervous, but your parents are waiting for you to take their arms to walk you down that aisle. You’ve been planning this moment for months, if not longer and it’s finally here.
Strangely, the butterflies are gone and you feel calm. You walk into the venue and you see all your friends and family, happily smiling at the first sight of you. And then you look further into the distance and you see your soon-to-be spouse, happily beaming from ear to ear. All of the stress that you had been living for what seems to be eternity has all melted away, just in the moment. Everything seems perfect and even the minor imperfections don’t bother you or you don’t seem to notice them anyway.
Looking back at this moment, you may not even remember all the negative emotions up until your ceremony. All you remember all the good, happy feelings on your wedding day and how everything came together perfectly.
