When planning stresses you, here is what to do.
I tell every one of my planning clients, you’re going to go through a phase of stress in the months before your wedding. It may be one part of your wedding plans or the whole thing that cause the stress. But it will likely happen. And then (with the help of your coordinator) you’ll move on from it and be excited in those final days of anticipation!
Well, if I wasn’t totally right – I just went through this process with you all. As many of you know I am planning my own unique and fun intimate wedding taking place in November. I have spent the last month and a half stressing about it all! How do I make all these ‘wants’ happen in budget? How do we get all these things there? Who is going to feed everyone? Why won’t a single taco truck cater in Kitsap county? Why don’t we just scrap this all and elope when we are in Yosemite this summer? I was pulling my hair out and it was clouding my excitement for sharing this with my closest friends and family.
Here is how I walk you through these stress-filled moments, and how I got myself out of the funk.
When stress begins to take over and you want to just say eff-it and elope, first, evaluate your planning priorities that you established in the beginning. Does the piece of the puzzle that is causing you stress make your priorities happen? If the answer is no, then decide with your partner if it is really necessary. Are you doing it out of obligation? If the answer is yes, decide why it may be important to you and your sanity to not include it in the day. Is it something you could just not do and the wedding wouldn’t know the difference? If the answer is yes, refer to the first question – if it doesn’t contribute to meeting your priorities, then don’t do it.
Here was my struggle – I was turning my wedding into a styled shoot. I had a lot of wants come up that I just added in because it would “look beautiful.” These were wants which overcomplicated set up, weren’t necessary for our reception (seriously, Emily, you don’t need a full seated place setting for a taco buffet…), and pushed us way out of budget. Our priorities were coming in under our $6000 budget, that we ate tacos, drank beer, have a crazy fun weekend with our family doing what we love, and somewhere in there get married. None of these extravagant design elements were contributing to those priorities. So, I let go. I scrapped those plans. I am less stressed and excited to enjoy the day, again.
The cause of this stress point can be as little as being pushed to spend money on a toasting champagne just because that’s “what you do” or as large as how you decorate your reception space. The reason, whether big or small, doesn’t make the stress any less real. It disrupts your daily life and kills the excitement that is planning a wedding.
It’s almost a given that you will go through this faze. When it hits, be ready to evaluate the cause of your stress against those three questions. Does it meet your priorities? Are you doing it out of obligation? If you didn’t do it, would the wedding really know? Pinpoint what you can do to simplify or just remove the cause of the stress so you can move on and get to enjoying wedding planning. At the end of the day, the most important part of your wedding is the marriage, not how styled the reception tablescape is.
(Photo by Jon Kaplan Photography)
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