According to Google, the global wedding industry now has a net worth of over $300 BILLION dollars. Read that again. $300,000,000,000 dollars for what might have been the best, or the worst, day of your life. It may have been a fairytale event to remember forever with 500 of your closest friends, or maybe there was a runaway bride. It is an industry capitalizing on someone’s hopes for 1 day out of their entire married lives. Both my brother and my coworker have recently popped the question to their future brides to be and are now pumping me full of questions about my big day. They want advice, budget questions, but most of all, they want to know what would I do differently. This year will be our 13th wedding anniversary and my answer to that question is simple: EVERYTHING. My husband and I had been dating for over 3.5 years and planned our wedding in nine months. We were in our early 20’s and to be honest, I was clueless. I wanted the “dream” wedding. I wanted the big poufy dress and a day where everyone looked at me and it was MY big day. I wouldn’t call myself a bridezilla necessarily but I wasn’t far off. I blame immaturity but I expected to have a nice, big wedding with a lot of people sitting on the bride’s side of the church. We had a good size bridal party, 6 on each side, of our close lifelong friends. Coincidentally I'm really still only friends with less than half of those people I just had to stand next to me on MY day. I had a beautiful wedding with plenty of people sitting on both sides of the church too, but that’s not what was important. Weddings seem to somehow have a snowball effect on even the thriftiest, carefree bride to be. One tiny decision leads to another and before long you’re knee-deep in the stressful throws of wedding planning screaming at your future husband who amazingly got down on one knee and asked you to spend forever, through sickness and in health, by their side. You’re trying to pinch pennies by DIYing things and arguing over what order the bridesmaids and groomsmen will walk down the aisle in. We all know the 3rd bridesmaid can’t walk down the aisle with X groomsmen and your sister bridesmaid or brother groomsmen will definitely hit on someone and then everything will be ruined. But then they’ll be insulted if they are last in line. You’re also not trying to throw the budget out the window but that becomes an every day hot topic. Discussing the wedding budget seems like everyday conversation now and eventually you are going to forget what you talked about before you got engaged. I would also like to place a disclaimer that I got married BP: Before Pinterest. My husband thanks the good Lord for that every time we think about our wedding. I remember wanting to create our own wedding invitations, HA! Feel free to laugh about my overzealous BP ideas. We had wedding invitations sprawled out all over our living room floor for a solid week. I also think that when it was all said and done, we didn’t save hardly any money by doing them ourselves. We had a Fall wedding and I also envisioned tons of pumpkins scattered all over the outside of the reception venue setting the perfect Fall tone. I didn’t just want pumpkins sitting there all boring and uncarved, however. No, that would have been too easy. I wanted them carefully sculpted to say "Zack + Ashley" with a single letter on each pumpkin followed by more pumpkins etched with the wedding date. Such a rookie move. If you’re counting, that’s 11 pumpkins just for the name portion before the even attempting the wedding date. We recruited friends and family and carved so many pumpkins and stayed up exhaustingly late trying to achieve the dream. MY dream. And why? What did we do with those after the 1 special day? Trash. They were in the trash within a few hours of my special day being over. I also remember stressing out over whether or not to splurge on a nice, high quality aisle runner for the church or to go with a cheaper version since I was trying to stick to the budget after all. I called my best friend who got married a few months prior and asked for her opinion. She wittingly asked me what I thought about the aisle runner she used since I was a bridesmaid in her wedding just a few months ago. Shockingly, I couldn’t remember. She laughed and said that was exactly her point. Turns out that she didn’t even use an aisle runner. Her point was valid and heard loud and clear. I was getting snowballed and obsessing over these tiny details that DO NOT MATTER.
I found out way after our wedding that my husband really had his feelings hurt and felt like his opinion never mattered when it came to decisions about OUR special day. Why hadn't I listened to his suggestions or taken him into consideration when he was the one who asked me to marry him? It's so easy to find yourself in a fog of childhood dreams of what you think should be done for your one and only, (hopefully), wedding. It's easy to feel pressured once you open that pinterest wedding board page to live up to everything you see that's being done. The weekly emails from The Knot and all of the ads that start popping up keep your mind spinning and focused on one thing and one thing only: expectations. But who's expectation should matter more than anything? Oh yea. That handsome guy who asked to spend his life with you by his side. So here’s my point: Your wedding day is about you AND your future husband starting your married lives together. It’s about your commitment to each other. It’s NOT about YOU. It’s not about your parents or your bridesmaids/groomsmen. It’s not about who sits on what side of the church. You loved this person so much that you wanted to spend forever with them. You want to laugh with them. Share stories and grow old together. Go through life’s ups and downs and share every gritty, raw moment together. Be each other’s best friends and confidants. This one-day is not going to make up for a life where you might not have felt like the favorite child or felt special. This day will fly by and it will feel like you are in a whirlwind and everyone is pulling you in a million directions and you know you poured yourself at least 4 glasses of wine and haven’t ate a solid meal in a week to fit into your wedding dress so why are you still sober?!
My advice to everyone who is planning their wedding is the same: Take the money and run! You will never live up to everyone’s expectations for your day and you might push your groom so hard you’ll be lucky if he even shows up on your wedding day. This is YOUR marriage and YOUR life together. Find the happy medium. As a mom, I would be crushed if my daughter got married and I wasn’t at least there to witness it with happy tears streaming down my face, but I also don’t need a 200+ guest list to prove how awesome my kid is to our friends and family. A small, intimate, immediate family ceremony followed by a month-long honeymoon is what I would do if I could have a wedding redo. I would have focused my wedding more on my husband than on it being “my” day. It should be your day. It’s your marriage. It’s your life together and I am extremely lucky my groom came down the aisle that day years ago because he was the reason this day ever existed.
XOXO,
Ashley
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