Last week on our facebook page, we reached out to our followers and asked our married friends to bestow upon us their best advice for surviving the chaotic planning process in one piece. As always, they came through for us and left some fantastic words of wisdom.
Skimming through their responses, I saw two very important themes:
Put your money where your heart is…
As you budget and finance your wedding, be sure you are putting money into the things you care about (and not necessarily what every auntie, cousin, sister, and mom cares about). If you try to go all-out on every aspect of the wedding day, the list and the dollar signs are going to build and build right along with your stress levels. Figure out what is really really important to you and your fiance and weight your budget (and attention) toward those items.
Enjoy the process!
We all know wedding planning is going to be stressful, even for the most happy-go-lucky of us all. But try, while you are in it, to step back and enjoy what you have going on around you. Have fun brainstorming ideas with your honey and finding ways to add your own personal touches to the design of everything. If you are DIYing it and truly enjoy making things, take a second to appreciate all of the gorgeous things you are handcrafting for the day. While picking your outfits or flowers or table settings, don’t stress about the perfect choice. Instead, see how beautiful everything is and daydream about how it’s going to look on your wedding day.
The bigger picture...
Not only will doing these two things help you survive the process without having a total bride- or groomzilla blow up, it will seriously impact the quality of your wedding and engagement photos.
“How’s that,” you ask?
First off, if you have put your energy into things you really love and cannot wait to see materialize during the wedding, those details are going to shine through in your photos. And when you see them, you’re going to remember all of the amazing things that came together so you could have that special thing for this amazing day. You’ll love the photos that much more because of it.
Secondly (and possibly more importantly), no amount of photoshop or makeup can cover up the empty look of a stressed or upset bride and it’s almost impossible to add a sparkle of excitement to a groom’s eyes after the fact. You both will look a million times more relaxed and happy if you actually feel this way when the day comes.
And even if you actually are happy and relaxed on the wedding day, if you spend every second leading up to it hating your life because the planning process was hellish, that overall feeling of doom you get from remembering the process will always tarnish your vision of the photos after the fact. You want to look back at these times and remember them fondly. Not with a wince and a sigh.
Because weddings are celebrations, my friends! A truly magical event that brings together everything you and your fiance have had so far and will have for years to come. And yes, there will be stressful moments, but make sure you do what you can to minimize them and that your energy goes into making things you want to happen, happen. The satisfaction you’ll have when you look back on your photos will always outweigh the hard times and you’ll remember the day for what it was meant to be: the happiest day of your life.
If you are a wedding-planning survivor and have tips or tricks you’d like to share with our soon-to-be-married friends, please share them in comments! We’d love to pass them along. :)
