Okay so you just got engaged! Life is special and sweet and you’re in a time period that you’ll never experience again. Being engaged is so fun. There’s an anticipation always there, always people excited for you, always silly butterflies in your stomach making everything so fun! But being engaged is also stressful because you have to plan your wedding. And while I don’t think wedding planning has to be stressful AT ALL, I know it still happens as I planning my whole wedding myself and definitely felt stressed at times. So! The point of this post. As someone who has planned her own wedding and attended many others, here are my top five tips for planning your wedding:
1. Give yourself TIME. And by this I mean two things: give yourself time to relax and enjoy being engaged before you start nailing down every detail; and, give yourself enough time to plan a whole wedding! I know not everyone has the luxury of picking the perfect wedding date, but I’d say give yourself at least 8 months, if not more from engagement date to wedding date. These things take time! Dresses take time to ship and be altered (this is the biggest problem I ran into, especially with COVID), caterers take forever to pick, travel details for out of town family are complicated, DIYs take forever to make. So take it slow.
2. Write everyyyyyyyyyyyything down. All of it. Getting things out of your head and onto paper helps relieve stress, and keeps you organized. For my wedding, I made giant spreadsheet of songs being played, MC cues, arrival times for vendors, items I was bring to the venue (and who was bringing them home for me), and so much more. At the top of the spreadsheet was a to-do list, and then a list of things already done so that I had some feeling of accomplishment! Doing this helped me soooo much, that I took that spreadsheet and turned it into a little free document you can save and print when you book with me!
3. Don’t invite guests just to invite them. Trust me, you only want people there who love you and want to celebrate you. It sounds selfish, but it’s really not. It saves both you and the guest money, and will keep you from having to invite 2000 people just because your grandma’s best friend’s brother wants to come.
4. Plan for your ceremony to start late! People are always running late, including you! It’ll relieve some of the chaos if you put a certain time on your invite, like 4PM, and have the actual start time be 4:30. With your timeline too, just relax when the day arrives. Whatever happens will happen, and you really won’t even notice once you start to walk down the aisle. Just focus on soaking in all the details rather than worrying about the timeline.
5. Relax! Chill! Let other people help you! Assign duties to your bridesmaids! You don’t have to do the whole thing. There are so many people who will want to help you, you just have to ask.
Aaand a bonus point:
You could also just elope ;)
Okay that’s all byeeee