Do you remember sex ed in middle school?
It’s a weird place to start an article about wedding planning, I know, but stick with me. Imagine you’re back in your middle school homeroom. The teacher is droning on and on about this thing called “safe sex.”
You are 12. The word “sex” still makes you giggle but you get the gist: Sex is fun but there are certain rules you need to follow if you’re going to stay safe while doing it. (Ha.)
Wedding planning during a pandemic is a lot like safe sex. You can do it and it doesn’t have to be a total drag. Promise.
“Where do we start?”
I’ve already gone into the tactical part of wedding planning during COVID. The highlights from that article:
Assign yourself one vendor a month.
Don’t give into the myth of “all the good [insert wedding thing] is gone because everybody rescheduled their 2020 wedding.”
Read your contracts.
Set yourself a hard “go, no-go” deadline of no less than 60 days before your current wedding date.
That’s all fine and well and it’s advice I stand by. But this article isn’t about crossing t’s and dotting i’s. It’s about putting the fun back into wedding planning. You know, spicing it up a bit.
And to do that you have to do something that might sound the exact opposite of sexy: You have to talk to your partner.
I know, this is terrifying but you can do it. This is, after all, the person you have agreed to bind your financial, personal, and mental health to for the rest of your respective lives. You should be able to talk to them, right?
“What do we talk about?”
I recently spoke to a couple who told me the best story: They said they took my free wedding planning prioritization resource and made a date night out of it.
They ordered food, cracked open a bottle of wine, and pulled up the worksheet. It’s a very similar process to what my husband and I did when we got engaged except our food was ramen and our wine was Sapporo because we got engaged in Japan.
The point of “So, You’re Planning a Wedding…” is to start a conversation between you and your partner about your wedding.
That sounds silly — “We talk about our wedding all of the time!” — but my bet is those conversations are about the who, what, where, and when of a wedding. Those details are important and we’ll get to them but you know what the most important question in all of wedding planning is? Why.
As in: Why are we doing this? Why are we having a wedding at all? And, in this day and age, why are we having at wedding when having any kind of event is extremely difficult and also dangerous?
Do not be dismayed by the question of “why.” It’s easy to default to, “Why am I having a wedding? I don’t know. I guess I’m an idiot! Let’s just not do it at all. [cries, flips a table, yells into pillow].”
This is known as despair. Let’s do our best not to give into it. Instead, let’s reframe the question: Why are you having a wedding with this particular person? My guess is it has something to do with love. And that, my friend, is when shit gets good.
But first, back to sex
I would have been a much happier person in my 20s if I had asked myself once or twice, “Why am I having sex right now?” I would have been a much wiser person if I had then asked this follow-up: “How do I want this sex to make me feel?”
Hormones make it hard to ask these two questions in the heat of the moment. Thankfully, wedding planning isn’t nearly as hot and heavy.
So how to do you spice up your pandemic wedding planning? You order that food. You crack open that beverage of choice. You ask your partner out on a date. You talk to each other.
You will be surprised at what your partner has to say. More than one person has told me “I had no idea X mattered so much to my fiancé(e)! It completely changed how we planned our wedding.”
I’m glad to hear it. I’m also not surprised because guess what? The Wedding Industrial Complex doesn’t want you to talk. WIC is much happier if you just lie back, close your eyes, and think of Martha Stewart.
You subvert this process when you ask your partner questions like “How do you want to feel on our wedding day?”
Asking this question is equivalent to huddling up before a big game. Rather than rushing out onto the field, you and your partner put your heads together and figure out a game plan. You get your wits about you instead of doing what WIC wants you to do: Jump onto the wedding planning merry-go-round and start spending money.
“What does this have to do with COVID?”
Everything. In many ways, COVID has done to the wedding industry what I wanted to do to the wedding industry. It has forced couples to talk to one another.
If you are looking at the calendar and wondering how you’re going to keep it up for another X months, talk to your partner.
If you feel yourself losing steam about wedding planning, talk to your partner.
If you are starting to resent your own wedding, talk to your partner.
The answers that come out of your conversation(s) may be challenging to hear.
You could realize that you need to call a timeout on planning your spring 2021 wedding until at least the new year arrives because wedding planning is sapping your will to live.
You might recognize that actually, the wedding you have planned for next summer with 150 guests is hurting you more than it is helping you.
You may decide that yes, you do need to ask all of your guests to take a COVID test before they come to your wedding.
This stuff is not easy to talk about but the alternative is worse. The alternative is that you end up hating your wedding. Not the actual day, I hope, but everything leading up to it and that everything is not inconsequential. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 560 hours of your life and 33,900 of your dollars and I haven’t even mentioned the love of your life.
So how do you feel excited/interested/hopeful about your wedding again? You remember why you’re doing it in the first place.
Want to see what else people are asking about COVID and wedding planning? Here’s a list.