My clients often feel isolated as they plan their weddings. They can’t talk about the hard parts because people think they’re complaining, ungrateful, or second-guessing their choice to get married. But I know something my clients don’t: They’re not alone. Hear it from people who’ve been there.
Allison C.
Married September 10, 2016
When it comes to your wedding, what was your...
Worst surprise?
How many silly traditions there are surrounding weddings.
It’s crazy that even if you’re comfortable personalizing your wedding and doing nontraditional things, you still end up exerting a lot of extra mental energy into making deliberate decisions like, ‘Yes, we will have toasts’ but ‘No, we don't want a garter or bouquet toss.’
For us, not having a dance floor was the right choice but that came with losing the tradition of the father-daughter dance. I had a lot of other great meaningful moments with my dad during the wedding and I don't regret this, but there’s a lot of emotional baggage attached to these choices. It’s worth it to recognize both that it exists and why that might be.
Biggest regret?
Not giving ourselves more wiggle room on time.
The day is such a blur that certain parts got really compressed. I would have started pictures earlier so that we weren’t rushing to our venue, and I would’ve got more time at our reception. We had a pretty small wedding relatively speaking (60 people) but it was still difficult to find time to talk with all of our guests, which we really wanted to do!
Best advice?
My husband says, ‘Give yourselves plenty of time to plan the wedding.’ I agree, and would add: One of my favorite moments on our wedding day was one that our day-of coordinator helped make and I might not have done otherwise.
She sent us off to our rental house for a half-an-hour break between our ceremony and our reception. That euphoric ‘we just got married for real!’ but also quiet downtime together was really special. I’ll never forget it.