Staying in Your Happy Place While Planning a Wedding, Pt. 1

I was a wedding coordinator for a year. One would think that when the time came to plan my own wedding, I would have been fully prepared for that full time job. But there were quite a few times in the planning process that I felt brand new. When it’s your special day, no amount of wedding planning expertise saves you from the unyielding onslaught of decisions to be made and the corresponding feelings of excitement, fear & everything in between.

I am the type of person that likes to feel prepared for every moment that comes my way. The more prepared I am, the more I feel like I’m winning. With all the unexpected obstacles that surfaced, winning often felt like a pipe dream. That’s when I needed the wisdom of wedding planning gurus who have gone before me. The help of both friends and vendors proved to be invaluable. With the preponderance of advice flying around me, you would think I was prepared for any possible scenario. With the preponderance of advice flying around me, you would think I was prepared for any possible scenario. And yet I still had to learn some things on the fly. I kept a mental list of the major stuff and now I pass on these particular tips to you:

Best Money You Can Spend on Your Wedding

Okay! If you don’t heed anything else I say, please Please PLEASE listen to this one: no matter how organized you are or no matter how broke you might be, you absolutely, positively need a wedding coordinator or planner.

I’m not saying you need someone to plan your wedding; but you do need someone the day of. If your decision to hire someone is strictly a budget issue, figure out your moola situation but make it happen! Drive Lyft for a month, sell lemonade, do whatever you have to do to make it happen. An easy way to save money on a coordinator is for you and the homies to do all the work leading up to the day and hire someone for the day-of needs. Or if you know someone who is super organized that would be willing to donate his/her skills day-of, do that. Whatever you do, you CANNOT be the person coordinating vendors and solving problems on your wedding day. My wedding coordinator hid things from me the day of the wedding so I was free to just be happy. That’s what every bride and groom deserves.

Budget Braggers & Busters

Braggers: When you’re in the throws of wedding planning, people will ask how it’s going. But not everybody has the same benevolent curiosity. Although I can’t prove it, some married folk enjoy having the conversation with you so they can brag about what a good deal they got for their own wedding (or try make themselves feel better about how much they spent.)

It took me a while to figure out why I was so irritated with certain vendors’ pricing. It was because I remembered that Sally told me she paid $2 for all her flowers and Maria fed 100 guests for $100. Comparison chokes the life out of your happiness so do yourself a favor and focus on your budget and no one else’s.

Busters: Don’t do it. Don’t bust your budget. (We did it. And it hurt. We don’t have any regrets but we also don’t have any more money. Who knew that my bank account could remind me of my early twenties???) Like for real, for real, before you plan anything, tally your available cash flow and then get pricing for all the things that you want. And then if you have more ideas/needs than money, be very slow to use a credit card to solve your dilemma. Nothing will pop that newlywed bliss bubble faster than when that Amex statement comes in the mail.   Bless your marriage by starting it off as debt-free as humanly possible.

Crazy Happens

I decided to get acrylic nails (for the first time) for the wedding. Two days before walking down the aisle, one of the nails came off and took half of my real nail with it. Yes, it did hurt as much as you’re imagining right now! I went back to the nail shop and they refused to fix it for fear of infection. So we went to Walgreens and got today’s version of a Lee Press On Nail. On my wedding day, I had 9 beautiful hombre nails and one French nail impostor. As much as I could, I would hide my impostor finger in pictures. In all my dreams for my wedding day, I never thought that I would have to play hide the mismatched finger.

My finger wasn’t the only dose of crazy. Multiple key members of the wedding were 90 minutes late, I lost my checkbook & couldn’t pay a couple of the vendors, and the baker forgot to decorate a tier of our cake, to name a few key WTFs.

I mention this because it’s vitally important to acknowledge that on your perfect day, crazy, disappointing, annoying ish is going to happen. Once you accept that fact, nothing will be able to ruin your day.

It’s Not Your Vendor’s Day

If you’re the kind of person that wants to just show up on your wedding day enjoying whatever the vendors created on your behalf, you can skip this one altogether. This piece of advice is for brides who have imagined having an ice sculpture at their reception or re-making the dance routine from Coming to America or any other fabulous idea that has been running around your mind for years. Unfortunately, not everybody is going to give a rip about your fabulous ideas and that is why it’s essential to ask the following question before booking any vendor: “Do you customize your services?” If the answer is no, don’t try to sell them on your vision; simply thank them for their time and find somebody else.

A few times I was told, “we can’t do that.” When I pressed the issue, I found out that the vendor didn’t feel confident doing something they’ve never done before. There is a difference between impossibility and incapability; find out which one you are working with. Be forewarned, some vendors would like you to pay them money to produce the wedding of their comfort. So should you sign a contract with a vendor and then run into some resistance, fight the good fight and have your wedding coordinator back you up [see Best Money You Can Spend on Your Wedding section].

Prepare for Your Marriage

Years ago, I had the privilege of running classes for my church. One of those classes was for couples looking to get married and for married folk looking for help with their marriage. Let’s say the class was like an intellectual marriage boot camp with numerous marriage workout stations (communication, finances, respect, etc.) There would be some stations where some couples either didn’t see eye to eye or they hadn’t yet gotten around to talking about that particular topic. Discovering the topics that needed to be addressed reminded of that game show ‘Press Your Luck’ where the contestants hoped to win one of the many prizes flashing on the big screen in front of them. So they hit their button and one prize would be selected on the screen. But sometimes the prize on the screen would quickly turn into a whammy and they would lose everything. I started thinking that a pre-marital class would go a long way in keeping away some of the relationship whammies. What I witnessed in those classes as a single person caused me to see that pre-marital instruction is just wisdom served up on a platter. And why wouldn’t my future spouse and I not want a piece of that?!

Angelo beat me to the punch. When we were dating, he asked me, “Shouldn’t we talk to someone wiser than us and do some sort of pre-marital counseling?” And so we did. We took a premarital class where we had to fill out an intensely thorough questionnaire that got into all our business: fidelity, past abuse, finances, emotional & physical health, appearance & attractiveness, etc. You name it, it was a question we had to answer. We had to fill it out separately and then share our answers with one another. One question was so uncomfortable, neither one of us answered it. But we forced ourselves to be that honest with one another and it set the standard for our marriage that we will spend the rest of our lives trying to uphold. Given that the planning your wedding is all kinds of time consuming, your marriage deserves the same intensity of preparation.

More to Come
I thought I would give a few little pointers but I’m just warming up. This blog is going to be a two parter because apparently, I have much to say….