Wedding Planning Zen

As we are in the thick of the Spring/Summer wedding season, I have to take a moment from the favor frenzy and color palette craziness to touch on something I've learned over many, many years planning weddings. Weddings are about happiness and joy and joining your life with another person. The rest is just window dressing.

Now it may be very pretty, very fun window dressing but how much you spend on flowers and whether or not your menus are printed on the exact paper as your place cards really won't matter if you aren't happy. The wedding industry has gotten so intense and the pressure on brides to have perfect, magazine-worthy days is so all-encompassing that most people are losing the joy. I've heard lately that brides are actually planning every detail about their weddings for the purpose of getting it into a top wedding blog or in the pages of a wedding magazine. They are actually making decisions based solely on whether it will increase their chances of getting featured! I think this is nuts.

A wedding is more than just a project for Type-A folks to strategize down to the nanosecond (and this comes from someone who makes really detailed wedding day timelines).  If you are losing the joy in the midst of all the planning pressure, step back and take a deep breath and remember that this whole thing is really about that guy or girl you're madly in love with. And you will still be madly in love with them if the ribbon on your programs isn't the perfect shade of melon or the cake flowers are in a cascade instead of grouped in clusters.  Once you've found someone who absolutely loves you (even when you obsess for months over the color of the flower girl sashes), the rest really is just icing on the cake.