I would love to say that my wedding was the best day of my life. Sure, I felt the most beautiful I ever had, and all my friends and family were parroting supportive words of love lined with toothy grins. But my wedding was a day I did not love. Actually, I didn’t even really like it.
In fact, I didn’t want to talk about for years after.
Before it had even begun, I was struggling to enjoy it. The checklist of other’s opinions, involvement (or lack of), the overwhelming amount of details and struggling to keep it all under budget was far from how I wanted to spend the better part of a year. Slowly, this ivory and rose-petaled dream grew before my eyes, like a balloon being blown beyond its capacity.
The day finally came. I had a botched spray tan, some hair extensions, and a room full of hairsprayed bridesmaids. Then that expanding promising balloon of details, dreams, and demands popped, sending shards of rubber farting through the air.
Microphones didn’t work, candle centrepieces couldn’t be lit, the wrong food entree was made, the DJ played the ‘do not play list’, and so on. Mix this in with a twonie bar and a crew of guests trying to quench their thirst in 37 degree C, and I was a bride feeling all the feelings of ‘this wasn’t the plan!’ and pity drinking all the feelings away. ‘Cause I had mature coping skills.
So take this as someone who would do everything differently, if I could go back. Here are some of my tips on planning a wedding that you don’t hate.
1. Have less bridesmaids. Sure I love my bitches in their matching green frocks. But it would save everyone a lot of money, hairdo hassle and leg room at the head table if you kept the wedding party to just a few. If you really want to ‘honour’ your friends on your special day, give them some extra drink tickets and let them wear their own clothes.
2. Don’t invite people you don’t want to. It’s your wedding, after all and it’s hard to be present in the day when you are faux-socializing with an assembly line of acquaintances. Make an invite list, then cut it in half. Be ruthless and honest. You don’t really want to buy most of these people an overpriced meal. Also, most of them won’t be in your life five years from now. If you keep that list to your tightest peeps, then maybe, just maybe you won’t have your creepy great-uncle yelling at you and storming out during speeches. Or your ex’s new girlfriend crying to you in the bathroom that he is still in love with you.
Good thing brides drink free at their own weddings.
3. Either make it big and fun for the guests, or just elope and make it all about you two. When you hit ages 25 to 30, it seems like every summer is filled with weddings. After a while, every bland buffet, hotel ballroom and unlit candle centrepiece kinda of blurs together in a mash of doing the YMCA without shoes, half cut on cheap table wine. The weddings that stand out are the ones made a little extra special: lawn games for guests, a weekend affair at the lake, intimate dinners, a non-stop bowl of long island iced tea.
4. Make your own traditions. If you are letting anyone other than you and your fiancé influence your wedding day, it won’t be your wedding day. If you don’t want a cake, don’t have a cake. If your aunt is pushing the cheaper, cramped grey convention room when you want the ranch barn with strung lights, invite less people and spend more on the vision you share with your partner. Don’t start your marriage making concessions for others. You will be spending a lifetime learning to compromise with your spouse anyways.
5. Splurge on the memories. For all the things I would change about my wedding I don’t ever regret the money we spent on photography. We had to readjust the budget, but we hired a pro who came well recommended and whose photos we just loved. She got all our photos done in an hour. It was the best hour of the day as it was just me and my husband alone, gazing into each other’s eyes frolicking through fields and rose gardens.
6. Meet all your vendors. I brushed off this detail as I planned my wedding from a distance. We ended up with a DJ who didn’t even provide the equipment he promised, played all the wrong songs, and took over the Emcee duties on his own tacky accord. My buffet was also lined with elderly women who were worried we’d run out of food and took control of the Ladle of Power from all the guests. It was embarrassing.
7. Keep it simple. Pinterest is a pusher giving you a little taste of all the handmade, overdone table favours, invites and centrepieces. There is also a chance they control the global mason jar market. We can’t be too sure. Either way, I got hooked on their high and spent hours making my own invites and centerpieces. All of it no doubt ended up in the recycling. Nowadays people are sending classy postcards or even emails for invites. Donations are made in place of table favours, or that money is spent on an ‘experience’ for the guests, like a photobooth or a caricaturist. Couples are forgoing centrepieces all together and putting pies out on the tables. You know what is better than floating candles and carnations? Pies! That’s what!
8. Drink more water. You should enjoy your wedding, but no bride wants to spend her wedding night on her bathroom floor….well, at least not for this reason. Keep your bubbles in check with some food and water and then seal your new union with some half-buzzed kinky wedding night sex. Because when else can your husband ever say he slept with a woman in a wedding dress?
9. If you have a family member offering to foot the bill on you eloping, kiss her square on the mouth, shout ‘YES’ and back your bags. Make note, those people will become of immense value in your life as the years go on, because they ‘get it’.
10. Remember it’s just one day. Seven years after my wedding day, I’m glad to look back on it and laugh at my 25 year old self. I can look back and laugh at the expectations I had for not only my wedding day, but my marriage.
I would do everything different, not just because we are different now, but also because we know it’s not getting married that matters the most, it’s staying married. Now our wedding anniversary is one of our most celebrated events each year because it’s another year we made it through. Crappy rentals, broken vehicles, hurt feelings, sleepless nights, sleepless babies, all the times we felt like letting go. We are no longer those two young people standing in expensive clothes saying expensive words we didn’t understand, but we are still together and that is what is worth celebrating the most.