3 controversial facts every Bride needs to accept before planning her wedding
It’s no secret that planning a wedding is an extremely stressful experience and like all brides in the class of 2020, I got to unlock an additional obstacle: the coronavirus pandemic.
However, pandemic or not, weddings seem to bring out extremes in people. As a bride, you will experience the best and the worst behavior from those you least expect; including yourself.
If you want to survive this without jeopardizing your relationships and mental health, here are 3 home truths that all brides need to accept:
You care more about your wedding than anyone else will and that’s okay.
Once upon a time, I made the difficult decision to decline a friend’s wedding invitation. I really wanted to celebrate with her but around the RSVP deadline, I was told that I would need a medical procedure which would potentially take place around the same time as her wedding. I wasn’t comfortable sharing my reasoning but what happened after shocked me.
Her fiancé ‘unfriended’ me on social media and she stopped talking to me.
Unfortunately, brides getting upset or angry with friends who have failed to meet expectations formed by the unattainable ‘#squadgoals’ from every Chick Flick is very common.
When you’re neck deep in Pinterest boards, it’s easy to forget that everyone else has a life as complex as your own, which they continue to live while you plan your special day. Having been there and done that, I can empathize.
But before you do something drastic and irreversible, try and remember:
‘Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die’
Instead, take a deep breath and let a dash of empathy flow through. Your family and friends love you and they will always be rooting for you, sometimes from afar.
Your friends and family do NOT have psychic powers.
I completely forgot this one. I know how stupid that sounds, but I did.
Not long after lockdown was lifted, when weddings were allowed again, my partner and I decided to have a simple ceremony followed by a private dinner celebration with 6 friends.
Unfortunately, every venue that I contacted, was desperately trying to understand these new rules and in the process of deciding whether reopening their private event spaces was a viable option. This left me in a frustrating limbo state for the wedding celebration.
My really good friend, let’s call her Sophia, is a problem solver. I would tell her how I felt and then she would propose an endless list of solutions to each of my problems. All great ideas, except I either already knew they wouldn’t work or had ruled them out because they weren’t right for me.
I never actually told Sophia this and would be on these daily calls with her, getting more and more frustrated. I began to dread her calls and would avoid talking about the wedding as much as possible. This made the situation worse and I was now unintentionally alienating her.
At some point, I snapped and then later realized the error of my ways. How could she have known when I hadn’t told her?
Just because someone loves you and has known you for an eternity, doesn’t automatically mean that they can read your mind.
This is really important to remember, OKAY? Anyway, I bet being friends with a psychic/mind reader isn’t even that great.
Your wedding day is not going to be the best day of your life.
Seriously, who started this rumour that a wedding was the epitome of happiness for women? What a duckhead.
Believing that your wedding day is meant to be the “best” day of your life creates unrealistic expectations and leaves a lot of room for disappointment.
I fell for this trap and lost weeks of my life scrolling through Instagram for inspiration to create the perfect wedding. During one of those sessions, I remember coming across this photo of a dance floor packed with friends and family; the incredibly happy couple propped up on their friend’s shoulders under a cloudless, star lit sky. It was picture perfect and I wanted that moment for the ‘best’ day of my life.
Except, I was getting married in rainy England, to someone who hated packed dance floors and even the thought of being propped up on someone’s shoulders gives me vertigo. The cycle of inspiration to desolation was exhausting and painful.
I was afraid that I would fail to have this ‘perfect day’ and be harshly judged by all.
When the pandemic hit us, wedding celebrations as we knew them were now deemed a potential health risk and no longer possible. This slapped some much needed perspective on the situation and while I would have preferred a less severe form of sanity check, here we are. It left me no choice but to prioritize what was really important and the pressure to make it ‘the best’ day of my life just fell away.
I had an imperfect but magical wedding. If I’m lucky, life will continue to give me the opportunity to create many wonderful and unique moments.
Why settle for just one?
I’d like to say that accepting these facts will result in the smoothest most chilled out wedding planning, but I would be lying.
Accepting this will make things easier. However, wedding planning (especially during a pandemic) has a habit of throwing unexpected curveballs on a daily basis.
At the end of the day, you have three choices: postpone, adapt or elope
Honestly, the most important thing is to remind yourself why you wanted to get married in the first place, for a̶ ̶f̶e̶w̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶g̶r̶a̶m̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶t̶o̶s̶ *love*.
