Up until I got married, the sum total of my experience with weddings included a handful of Michael’s college friends who got married right out of school, various flower girl and junior bridesmaid obligations at family events, and that one time I dressed up as a bride for my birthday party when I was five. Since I came of age in New York City, where basically no one gets married before the age of forty, I never went through that period in my twenties where you try to figure out how to attend fourteen weddings in one summer without declaring bankruptcy. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been to more than fourteen weddings total (save for the ones I used to photograph). So it totally caught me by surprise this summer when my sister, who is twenty-five, started talking about weddings all the time. It turns out she has become the de facto wedding planner for her friend group (the apple does not fall far from the… other apples on the tree?). And now, as she’s beginning to think about her own potential future wedding, I’m finding myself having a lot of conversations with her about the wedding industrial complex, why most of the wedding “rules” are made up, and essentially repeating all of the APW wedding mantras I’ve learned over the past seven years that haven’t quite made it the suburban neighborhood of my youth.
But somewhere around the thirtieth midday call from her, I started wishing for an easy way to introduce her to all the things I take for granted about weddings. Mostly because, much as I love our chats, I do have… you know… a job. And then Meg forwarded me the manuscript for the new #APWPlanner. And ever since, I’ve just been sitting around diverting her inquiries until it comes out. Because surprise, ninety-nine percent of her questions are answered by it. So as we head into the holidays, when half of everyone’s friends (and maybe even yourself) are getting engaged, here are five reasons I’m buying my sister the #APWPlanner the second it comes out:
1. THERE’S NO SALES ANGLE: Let’s be real for a second: it is really hard to get unbiased information about planning a wedding, because most of the people who have access to the information you need are trying to sell you something. Which means it’s often hard to figure out if you actually need all those drinking glasses for your reception or if the rental company is just trying to make twice as much money on your wedding by upselling you on twice as many drinking glasses as are logistically necessary. And then you get all up inside your own head convincing yourself everything is a sales pitch, and next thing you know you’ve run out of drinking glasses at your wedding and your aunt is doing dishes during the reception. (It’s a vicious cycle.) But the #APWPlanner isn’t trying to sell you any one kind of wedding. And there is no sales angle. Meg interviewed over three dozen wedding industry professionals while writing the #APWPlanner, from super high-end rental companies to budget-savvy DIY experts, with the simple goal of giving you all the information needed to plan the wedding you want. Which means that even if my sister is having a wildly different kind of wedding than the one I had, or from the kind we show on APW, she’s still going to find relevant, trustworthy, and most importantly unbiased information in the #APWPlanner. Well, unless you count wanting you to have a sane wedding as biased.
2. IT HAS ALL THE THINGS. In the past two months alone, my sister and I have had various wedding-related conversations, including:
- What’s the etiquette on parental involvement in weddings?
- Are wedding colors even necessary?
- How do you figure out bridal parties for same sex weddings?
- What do you do with a big empty venue?
And the list goes on and on (and on and on). Now, why does she keep calling me instead of searching this lovely website for answers? Because it’s easier. I’m a one-stop knowledge drop. And luckily for me, so is the #APWPlanner. There is literally nothing in my brain that isn’t in the book. Probably with more accurate numbers. So in a few weeks, I’ll be off the hook and we can go back to our normal sisterly routine of gossiping about the rest of our family.
3. IT PAYS FOR ITSELF. The truth is, my sister could maybe find most of the information in the #APWPlanner through a very thorough combination of Googling, searching the APW archives, and calling local vendors. But that takes… time. And the $15 it will cost me to send her the #APWPlanner will totally be offset by the hours of on-the-ground research she now doesn’t have to do. (Or as Meg pointed out to me, “I didn’t know ninety percent of the stuff in the book before I wrote it, so there’s no chance it already exists on APW.”) More importantly? It will save you all the money you’re about to spend on stuff you either don’t need, or are going to realize you DO need, but not until it’s too late and therefore have to pay a premium. And that number is probably more like $1500, if I’m using my own wedding mistakes (cough) as a benchmark.
4. IT’S IN A BOOK! SO IT HAS TO BE TRUE. Sometimes I forget that outside of my progressive indie wedding bubble, things like, “Of course you can have a mixed gender wedding party,” are not considered a given. And that one of the more complex parts of planning a wedding is getting everyone around you—particularly the ones whose favorite words are “tradition” and “have to”—on board with those progressive indie wedding ideas. The nice thing about a book filled with information from professionals is that it adds a layer of authority that sending your family an Internet article can’t get close to. So if you’re struggling to explain certain concepts to your parents (like a wedding mission statement, or a non-traditional wedding venue) hand them the #APWPlanner and let it do the talking for you.
5. I don’t want her making the same mistakes as me. I’ve said it before (probably too many times), but I straight up did not know how to plan a wedding when I got married. I looked at the Internet, saw what other people were doing, and figured, “Well, how hard can it be?” Except, all of the stuff the wedding industry tells you is super cool, still takes work. And sometimes the “laid-back” option actually takes more work (I’m looking at you, DIY flowers). So unlike the majority of wedding planning books which feature fill in the blank pages and ask you to put in information as you figure stuff out (thanks?), the #APWPlanner fills in the blanks for you. Not sure how much beer you need for your self-serve bar? #APWPlanner knows. Want to know what hidden costs that taco truck wedding might have? #APWPlanner can tell you. And here’s where I’ll answer the question that all the recently engaged folks have already asked: yes, it’s still totally helpful even if you’ve already gotten a lot of the big picture stuff out of the way. Because what I learned in my own wedding was that most of my mistakes were not in the big picture early planning phase of things. They were in the nitty gritty two-months-out phase of things. (Spoiler alert: that’s when all the stress happened too. Go figure!)
The embarrassing truth is that I can’t help wanting to dole out advice to everyone planning a wedding within earshot of me, including my sister. There’s just so much information that gets learned the hard way when you’re in the trenches that if I can save someone I love from doing things the pain-in-the-ass way, why wouldn’t I? And also? Selfishly? I have to go to these weddings. I might even be a bridesmaid. So I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t helping myself out here a little too.
BUY THE #APWPlanner:
