Planning A Wedding vs. Planning a Marriage

If we put as much time and effort into planning our wedding day as we did into planning our marriage, maybe the marriage success rate would be higher. Most people spend anywhere from six months to a year planning a wedding but never consider planning a marriage. TheKnot.com provides a very handy checklist for the newly engaged to check off.

To list a few:

Budget, invitations, stationery, wedding cakes, wedding flowers, reception ideas, ceremony and vows, DIY wedding ideas, bridal party, your guests, music and dancing, photo and video, wedding favors, rehearsals, transportation and sticky subjects.

If I learned one thing during my Catholic Engaged Encounter it was that a wedding is for one day, a marriage is for a lifetime. See mom? I did learn something. Cheesy but true.

Ok so I have only been married for eight months give or take but I would like to share some thoughts on those necessities that websites like The Knot make us crazy over.

Budget: Whether you spend a little, a lot or a “not too big, not too small, just the size of Montreal"amount on a wedding,  your guests will eat, they will drink, they will dance and they will most importantly go home. You will then go on living life, which is not free so keep that in mind. The E! Channel is not filming or paying for your wedding so do not feel obligated to "Keep Up With The Kardashians." We all know how those marriages turn out anyway.

Invitations: Invitations are a means of simply that, inviting your guests. Whether they are floral, textured, square, round, pocket, modern, rustic or vintage, your guest will open it, say “Awww” and stick it with whatever magnet is available to their refrigerator which in no way coordinates with the invitation that you and hubby carefully created on numerous websites while falling asleep at dinner or behind your computer at work, seeking approval from mom, mom-in-law, maid of honor, the pool man and your nosy aunt before narrowing it down to four and and just closing your eyes and choosing one. So don’t stress. Spell your names correctly, give us a time, date and location and we are there.

Stationery: This is for ‘Thank you” cards. Make it easy, match them to your invitations and order them at the same time.

The cake: Tiers, flavors, fillings, round stand, square stand, décor, and embellishments. The only people who care about your cake are you, your mother, your mother-in-law-to-be and your decorator. Most of the time, WE don’t get to even eat it and we knock it over on the dance floor anyway. Or in my case, its ends up with glow bracelets sticking it out of it. Sorry aunty Angie! Advice? Make sure you choose a flavor you love. DO freeze the top tier like your momma, your mammy, your granny and your auntie told you to. I was out of dessert the other night and I pulled mine out of the freezer, unwrapped the many layers of wax paper and scotch tape and saw the tiny stab wound my husband and I made in the cake last December right before we fed each other our first cake as husband and wife and it made me go, “Awwwww.”

Wedding flowers: I was lucky enough to have a mother-in-law who specialized in floral arrangements. I handed the reins over to her on this one. Advice? Pick a color and let someone else do it. You don’t know what looks pretty even if you think you do. Our mothers have been reading issues of “Better Homes and Gardens” since before we could tie our shoelaces so let them handle it. Take a moment the night before or the morning of to go and look at your venue all decorated and say, “Awwww” because on the day you don’t even know you have feet. Everything truly is a blur and you won’t remember it.

Reception Ideas: Food, bar, done!

Ceremony and vows: Stick with the standard “repeat after me.” You will NOT have an enormous sense of confidence that you THOUGHT you would to pour your heart our to your loved one in front of 200 of your closest friends and family members. That’s your husband’s job, ha-ha! DO think of something hilarious before you walk down the aisle because you look ugly when you cry and it’s a happy day. So if you must cry, practice in the mirror before you do it front of all of us.

DIY: Don’t DIY. It’s fun to leaf wrap one mason jar and fill it with glass gems but it’s not fun to do it 100 times when you have a dog barking for his walk, a pile of files to go through at the office, dinner to cook for your husband, an empty treadmill that you should be on and too many loads of laundry to do.

Bridal party: OMG, who is going to make the cut? Unless you want a 20 person bridal party, you are going to hurt some feelings. Big bridal parties are hard to photograph and Cindy Lou's arm will be cut out of every photo. Your oldest friends are not always your closest friends. So don’t feel obligated to have them in it. Sally from pre-school who you haven’t seen in 25 years does not need to be in your wedding just because you two used to dress up in sheets in front of the mirror holding hairbrush bouquets and play “Bride” and you send her a Christmas card every year. Who are you likely to be close with for the rest of your life? Being a bridesmaid is WORK. Save someone the trouble and the awful dress. This way they can enjoy your wedding and not be enslaved by you all night long.

Guests:  Treat your guest list like a bonsai tree. Look at it from afar. Decide how you want to shape it. Remove the weeds and continually trim for maintenance.

Music & Dancing: Remember that the cameras are rolling even when you have had your thirteenth vodka and Red Bull with intermediate champagnes. I know I forgot to remember and now I have a three DVD wedding video, the last of which is full of horrible dance moves performed by mostly me.

Photo and video: I would seriously opt for a raw, live video as opposed to one set to music with cute fading in and out making you and your husband look like an ad for eHarmony. This way you get to hear all the things that people thought they were whispering as you walked down the aisle. Drunken people posing for what they think is a still photo but is actually live video is pretty awesome too.

Wedding favors: Wedding favors are like the candy stands you get wedged between at the grocery or Target before checking out. You don’t need them. You want them.  They look enticing in photos. $1.99 times 200 hundred guests is a lot of money. I wanted bubbles. I chose tiny silver monogrammed jars of bubbles from a website in China. When I got them, I had 200 monogrammed stickers to peel and stick on my hexagonal shaped bubble jars………by myself. Dementia almost set in until thankfully “Father of the Bride” happened to be on, so I watched it and I  “awwww” and happily continued sticking. I also had hundreds of glow bracelets and necklaces that my bridesmaids hurriedly cracked and snapped together somewhere between eating, dancing, holding my dress while I used the bathroom and taking shots. Here’s the clincher…….CONNECTORS! They didn’t just snap and connect; they had separate connectors, hundreds of tiny clear plastic connectors. God bless their precious hearts, we were all aglow in no time.

Rehearsals: Rehearsals are long; time consuming, confusing, obligatory and nerve wracking. But, they do lead to dinner so go ahead and have one.

Transportation: Do opt for transportation. It’s affordable and after all, you spent how much on bubbles?

Sticky subjects: What?  TheKnot.com did not provide you with a checklist for marriage? Just a wedding? While planning a wedding is exciting and a once in a lifetime (hopefully) event, marriage is FOR a lifetime. So compromise! When he told you he’d rather an outdoor than indoor venue did you storm out the door and drive off in your car? When you wanted salmon on the menu and he preferred lamb, did you send him hundreds of mean texts all day long? Hopefully you answered “no” to those questions. There will be many more decisions to be made in marriage and ones that are far more important than fruit filling or custard. So look back on the blissful, carefree days of planning your wedding when planning your marriage. When he comes home with 8 lemons when you SPECIFICALLY asked for 12 eggs, just sigh, make lemonade

………And have a Latte.