How We're Planning Our Wedding

Photo by Emily Oud Photography

As mentioned, this series is going to share how Eric and I are going about planning our wedding: what’s important to us, what we’re trying to keep in mind, and what we want our wedding to feel like. I’m not pretending to be a wedding planner here (although being a wedding planner did make my “what I want to be when I grow up” list) - I’m simply trying to add my voice to the conversation.

I’m going to delve into some of the specifics when it comes to our wedding, but I wanted to kick off this series by outlining the overall goal that Eric and I set the moment we sat down to start planning:

Let’s make our wedding fun and let’s make it about us.

That’s it. That was our only goal. If we walked away from our wedding with sore feet from too much dancing and sore faces from too much smiling, we’d know our wedding was exactly what we wanted it to be. Everything else in between didn’t matter as much as the fact that Eric and I wanted to look back on our day knowing that we had the best time celebrating our commitment to spend the rest of our lives together.

Now, coming from two Grade-A people pleasers, this was not and is not an easy feat. I can sit here all day and say that I threw the opinions of my parents and friends and complete strangers (yes, I've gone to strangers for their opinions) to the wind, but I think we all know by now that's exactly true (I've had 3 people read this post before I published it). But with each new task, the urge to text anyone with a heartbeat and an opinion subsides and I am able to make that decision with Eric. This has made all the difference when it comes to how I felt about wedding planning.

Because let me tell you, it is EXHAUSTING trying to figure out what will make everyone happy. And regardless of how many people you’re inviting to your day, there is absolutely no way that everyone is going to like every single one of your decisions. So in the end, the only thing you can do is try and make you and your fiancé happy. I’m fully aware that this is the most cliche thing I could have started this blog with, but it’s a lot harder to follow through on this than you might think. And really, at the end of the day, you are planning an entire party that centres around you and your future spouse. So if there was ANY time that selfishness was acceptable, this would be it.

Back to the point: by keeping the theme of fun in our minds, it ended up helping shape a lot of the decisions that we had to make. If it wasn’t fun, then we weren’t going to do it. If it didn’t make our day more enjoyable, then it wasn’t going to happen. So yes, there might be some “unique” qualities about our wedding, and we might’ve cut some of the “traditional” aspects that we didn’t want to do. And while I know this won’t sit well with everyone, I’m sticking up for the choices we’ve made because … well… *clears throat* it’s our wedding.

I don’t want to give any more away, so I’ll leave you with that. In my next post, I’m going to talk about what Eric and I looked for when searching for a venue (plus a “fun” story on how losing our originally booked venue ended up being more than okay).

Thanks for reading! To those reading who are married or planning their wedding - what was/is important to you and your spouse when you planned your wedding? I would love to hear from you - leave a comment below!