Posts Tagged ‘Unexpected Lessons’

Apr 2013

As Meg mentioned in her Letter From The Editor yesterday, the internet has a way of magnifying the bad (the good too, but a lot of the time, the bad). I see this particularly when it comes to our relationships. When we’re mad at our partners, or when we feel like we’re in a slump, some days it’s just easier to hole up in a room and practice the art of rumination with our internet friends rather than turning our energy towards change. And while occasionally this can be helpful (sometimes you just have to vent, you know?), most of the time it just makes us sadder, angrier, and more focused on the things going wrong. So to combat this cycle, we want to focus today’s open thread on the good in our relationships.

Meg and I have talked about this at length with each other, but we both have a tendency to frontload our worry. Which means that when it comes to big life changes, we anticipate the worst, only to find ourselves pleasantly surprised by reality most of the time. It’s one of my worst habits, and it often leads to a spiral of everything that has ever gone wrong, ever, which means obviously this thing I’m about to do will also go completely wrong, obviously. Usually the only way to get me out of the funk is for Michael to remind me that the doom spiral I’m feeling is probably not real and in fact most things I’m worried about turn out perfectly fine.

So in the spirit of reminding people like me that The Good exists, today’s open thread asks: what was something you were unsure of before you got married, that turned out just fine? (Or even better, that turned out to be kind of awesome?) For me, I was terrified that marriage was going to take away part of who I am, but instead it’s allowed me to be a less-filtered, more-authentic version of myself that I like so much better than before.

So now it’s your turn. What’s been your pleasant surprise of marriage? Let’s turn this place into an echo chamber of awesome today.

—Maddie

Photo by APW Sponsor LeahAndMark & Co.

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Posted in: Uncategorized | 121 Comments »

Oct 2012

Wedding Graduates: Viv & Len

*Viv, Wedding Photographer & Len, Lawyer/Musician*

As we explore the ways that past, present, and future intersect this week, Vivian’s post feels like a perfect fit. Her story is a reminder that sometimes very big things do go wrong at weddings (like, say, having to spend the night in a hospital waiting room while your partner undergoes emergency surgery kind of big) and it can completely uproot us from all of our carefully laid plans. And when that happens, it’s perfectly okay to mourn for the wedding that wasn’t, while still being grateful for the wedding that was. Because either way, it’s yours.

You can’t avoid a certain level of expectation when planning an event as iconic as your wedding day. Especially since I work in the wedding industry, Len and I had a very clear idea of how we wanted our wedding to go. With only four months to plan, we knew that to keep my sanity I needed to be realistic with my expectations and prioritize what was important to us. We envisioned a relaxed and fun celebration. We purposely chose locations that were naturally beautiful, saving us a lot of work. And I made sure I didn’t overwhelm myself with too many DIY details that I foresaw myself scrambling to finish at the last minute. I didn’t want to fixate on the little things and lose sight of what was most important: celebrating our love and commitment.

Len and I decided to have a small, intimate wedding with close family and friends and extend the party for a long weekend. To facilitate this, we rented a large house in Sonoma (complete with a pool, hot tub, tennis court, and large backyard) so that we could host a relaxed wedding weekend. Our families would stay with us at the property for four days and we’d invite our friends to come hang out with us at the house. We had a packed schedule of events starting with a Friday night family dinner, a Saturday ceremony in the backyard, reception lunch at a restaurant in downtown Sonoma, dinner back at the home Saturday evening, and a Sunday catered brunch and BBQ. And after all the wedding fun, my husband and I planned an easy five-day honeymoon in Palm Springs for some well-deserved R&R.

Well, as life would have it, things didn’t go as planned.

We made it through our morning ceremony and lunch reception without a hitch. It was a gorgeous sunny Sonoma day and Len and I had a wonderful time with our small group of guests. The ceremony was sweet and personal (both of our parents as well as Len’s niece shared words of wisdom, and my sister played guitar and officiated); the reception lunch was simple and elegant, just as we imagined; and the food was absolutely delicious. After lunch Len said he started feeling a little funny, but he chalked it up to residual wedding stress and pushed through a post-lunch photo session with our photographer. But when we returned to our rental house for an after-party dinner, Len started feeling worse.

He attempted to mingle with our guests but had to excuse himself by the end of the night. Around one in the morning, his pain was so unbearable we decided to go to the local emergency room. When my husband was diagnosed with appendicitis at four on Sunday morning, my mind froze. Up until this point, we had accounted for all the important details for the wedding. We had a plan. But now we were thrown a curveball. All my expectations for a beautiful, fun, relaxing wedding weekend and honeymoon were replaced with a surreal mix of emotions. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Viv & Len

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates | 38 Comments »

Jul 2012

When a People Pleaser Plans a Wedding

Who am I kidding? It’s wedding season, and here at APW we’re just giving into its thrall. This anonymous post nails so many things, including the pressure of planning, the magic that a wedding (can) bring. And. Because there is so much good stuff in this post, let me draw your eye to one line. Later this week, we’re going to talk about being a guest at a wedding, so until then, I want us to not lose this wonderful line about Other People and the wedding: “Well, if their wedding was half as amazing as ours was, I can now understand that they didn’t actually care about those dresses (well, maybe a little). Mostly, they just wanted to feel that magical feeling again.” Because this, you guys, this is it.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a people pleaser. I’m also an over-achiever. I like to be liked. I like to succeed. I care what people think of me. I’m the kind of person who “takes one for the team” if it means avoiding conflict and reaching the end goal more quickly. I’m passionate about many things, but I approach those things with equal parts reason and practicality. Maybe it’s because I’m from the Midwest. Maybe it’s because I am a first-born child of multiple divorces. Maybe it’s because in my career, I lead teams of creative people and daily navigate fast paced, emotionally charged environments.

Newly engaged people take note: the above traits will not serve you well in the early stages of wedding planning. In fact, if you’re not careful, you may quickly start to feel like being engaged is nothing but an endless series of opportunities to disappoint people. You will immediately be expected to have and share strong, public opinions on many issues, most of which you likely never considered before. You will endure stares of shock and horror when you announce that you don’t want your bridesmaids to wear matching dresses, and that you’re considering wearing a short white dress instead of a ball gown. You will constantly be told: “Do what you want! It’s your day! It’s all about you!” You, being a practical people pleaser, will realize that those statements are not actually true. You will probably feel compelled to point out to people that it’s not all about you; it’s your fiancé’s day too, and in a way also the day of your parents, and your entire guest list. You will want to please the guests so they don’t judge you, after all. I won’t sugarcoat it: at this point, crying (lots of it) will probably ensue.

Here’s the secret I know now, that I wish I knew then. This thing, this wedding that at times feels so overwhelming you wonder why they’re not using wedding planning as a legal form of torture, it will provide you with a kind of joy you’ve never experienced before. It will give you a feeling that I can’t compare to anything else in my life up to this point or put into words. It’s something that you have to experience in order to feel. Suffice it to say—it actually is worth it. And remember all those people you felt like you were disappointing back in the early stages of planning? Well, if their wedding was half as amazing as ours was, I can now understand that they didn’t actually care about those dresses (well, maybe a little). Mostly, they just wanted to feel that magical feeling again. It turns out; they were already in on the secret too. Continue reading When a People Pleaser Plans a Wedding

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, Planning | 34 Comments »

Jun 2012

Wedding Graduates: Christy & Duncan

*Christy, Art Director, Advertising & Duncan, VP of Customer Service, Software Company*

Today’s wedding is about an unexpected adventure, a hardship, and really a bit of magic. It’s about the magic of deciding to accept what life throws at us, to still celebrate, and to love the hell out of each other. I’d say more, because I love this wedding so much, but I really don’t want to spoil the story. So I’m going to let Christy tell it.

When it came to planning my wedding, I wasn’t intimidated by the details. I know some people get overwhelmed thinking about flowers and tablecloths and programs and don’t care, for example, to spend a great deal of time worrying whether or not chartreuse and lime are close enough approximations of the same color green. As an art director, I worry about details for a living. I revel in them, actually. I really do care about the (admittedly subtle, but important-to-me) difference between chartreuse and lime. Still, I dreamed not about the perfect designer WIC wedding, but a wedding filled with not-so-perfect DIY details. I wanted our celebration to be unique, fun, and expressive of who we are as people. Which is to say, not too stuffy, not too fancy, yet thoughtful and good looking.

When I tried to explain this to people, it stressed everyone out way more than I anticipated. My mom and aunt (both crafty ladies in their own rights) had major reservations about getting everything done in my relatively short timeline. They looked at our six-month engagement as an obstacle and a source of stress, but we just looked at it as a reason to make quicker decisions. The venue we loved had a date open just over five months away from the day we visited and we booked it. Everything else had to happen in that time span, or it wasn’t going to happen. I kept saying that if we didn’t get X or Y done in time, what did it really matter? “Mom, what is the worst that could happen? There won’t be a centerpiece. So what? We’ll still be married. Isn’t that the most important thing? Isn’t that the reason we’re doing this in the first place!?”

Those kinds of conversations dominated our weekend DIY sessions, and I’m still not sure everyone really believed that I was taking a rational approach to things. My stepmom worried that I might regret not having some detail that I’d wanted because I couldn’t get it done in time, that my wedding day would fall flat because I tried to take on too much. My mom worried that my perfectionist (though I prefer “perseverant”) nature would cause more problems when something didn’t turn out the way I envisioned it. I could see everyone thinking, “Really? You only get one shot to make this everything you want it to be. Don’t you want it to be perfect?”

Of course I wanted it to be perfect. But I stood my ground. Armed with APW wisdom garnered from hundreds of posts, I responded with things like, “You just have to be flexible in your idea about what makes the day perfect.” All that mattered was that I was going stand up and declare my love for this person in front of everyone else who mattered to us. And if I managed to build a beautiful mobile of paper flowers for us to stand under while we did it, well, all the better.

Looking back on those conversations now, I can’t help but think that my confidence in my ability to shrug off the relative importance of those details I’d labored over was somehow tempting fate. Because while I was prepared to deal with things going awry on the wedding day, I still envisioned the best possible version of myself, greeting whatever the day threw at us with a decent amount of grace while, naturally, looking as stunning as possible. What happened next knocked the wind right out of me, and I feared I would fail on both fronts. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Christy & Duncan

Posted in: The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates | 37 Comments »

Jun 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Slow Motion and Acceleration

Yesterday we talked about how a life-threatening accident can change your marriage in a way that shared a profound sense of strength with all of us. Today we’re also talking about a life-altering medical emergency, but in a way that is all about hope born through struggle. Here is Emily’s story. (And yes. Their wedding is the Wordless Wedding for this afternoon. So it’s that kind of joyful, hopeful, and hard day.)

Our lives for the past few years feel like they have been all about dealing with curveballs. My husband, Matt, has dealt with them with an ease that I envy. I, as a planner and organizer, have had my bouts of sobbing and hyperventilating that come before acceptance. Matt and I had been dating about three years when the first one hit. Up until then we had been happily moving in a standard dating trajectory of two career-minded people living in New York. We had moved in together about six months before and were enjoying merging our lives. Matt had dealt with back and leg pain for as long as I had known him. It started out minor and had been slowly growing more intense to the point of almost being unbearable. He had gone to a series of doctors and none of them had been very helpful. It seems back pain is so common that doctors don’t always take it very seriously. They looked for alignment issues or a slipped disk and when they didn’t find anything major, they mostly shrugged their shoulders and told him to take some Aleve. One even treated him with steroid injections and was upset with him when the pain didn’t get better.

Then one day he came home after some tests with a new doctor, sat me down on the couch and told me that they had found a tumor on his spine. It was almost a relief. At least we had a diagnosis, but the plan from there wasn’t simple. As it turns out, doctors are reluctant to open up the spine of an otherwise healthy thirty-year-old man, but the tumor wasn’t going to go away on its own and it wasn’t going to stop growing. A few months later we walked into the hospital at 7 a.m. with his parents so that a surgeon could cut through his spinal column and remove the tumor. It was pretty much the worst day of my life. At about 4 p.m., after spending all day in the waiting room watching family members being told that everything went well, the surgeon came out and took us into the hall. The surgery had been “successful.” They had been able to remove the whole tumor, and he was awake—but he wasn’t able to move or feel either of his legs. They were taking him for tests and we would have to wait and see what happened. After a few hours of waiting and hearing nothing his father eventually tracked him down to the ICU. We spent the next few days dealing with the typical hospital frustrations and exhaustion, a lack of answers to our questions, and minimal luck finding the people who should be able to answer them.

There are too many moments from that week to recount. Calling my boss to try to “calmly” tell him I would be out another day and then completely breaking down on the phone. Getting a hospital roommate who’d had a similar surgery and was already walking the halls. Watching the first physical therapy session where they just tried to get him to sit up. Finally sitting with one of my best friends in my apartment and sobbing. At the end of the week they moved him to a rehab center across town where he spent the next two months. It was a tough couple months but he was amazing. He decided that he was going to get better and worked at it constantly. While he was unwilling to accept anything other than total recovery, I remember the moment where I realized that if he never got any better than he was that day, that we would have a good life together, a life that I wanted. I was walking through the park, talking on the phone with one of my best friends whose mom had polio as a child. I realized that his condition at that moment was what her whole life had been. Suddenly I could picture it all and it wasn’t so bad. She had a good job, two wonderful kids, and pretty great life. From then on I knew I was “in” and whatever happened I could deal with it. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Slow Motion and Acceleration

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 43 Comments »

Jun 2012

The Devil Is (Not) In The Details

After our exploration of imperfection so far this week, APW Associate Editor Maddie is here, to, well, hit the nail on the head. Because when we’re wedding planning, it’s so easy to convince ourselves that we’re not striving for wedding industry perfection, just emotional perfection. Or to think that when other people talk about moments of Wedding Zen or Wedding Magic, it’s because for them everything went exactly right. And what we miss in that is that it’s the gritty imperfect details in life where the magic really lives. The magic exists when things go wrong and we allow ourselves to feel however we feel—to be present in it.

Most people don’t know this, but I have a tattoo. It’s a pretty sizable one, on my back, in the shape of wings. I got it with my mother shortly after I turned twenty-one as a way to commemorate my late sister and the things my mom and I have had overcome in our relationship. I love my tattoo. It makes me feel like a badass, and once upon a time it was shaded with the colors of the rainbow (it’s a little faded these days).

I had been planning on getting a tattoo for years, so when the decision was finally made and plans were being planned, the act of getting a tattoo somehow managed to work itself into becoming something of a symbol to me. It was going to be ultimate bonding moment between my mother and me. I would have her full attention for a whole day, away from my siblings; together, as we inked our bodies in solidarity, we would break down any walls that had built up between us over the years. On this one momentous occasion, everything would be perfect. If only for a moment.

But of course, the reality of the situation was that my mother and I were going to be doing an activity together, and no matter how important, the complications of daily life were going to work their way in. I had one idea for a tattoo artist, my mom had a recommendation from a friend she wanted to check out. My dad had made the mistake of telling my younger sister that day that we were going to have to put our dog down, and she ended up calling my mom repeatedly during our bonding moment, interrupting our one-on-one time. It was still an amazing experience, but when I left, something felt off. I hadn’t gotten my perfect moment. I wanted the kind of story that you could tell to future generations, one that was unmarred by imperfections. Not to mention, this moment was literally going to follow me around forever. How could I look at a permanent marking on my body and not remember everything that went wrong?

What’s funny is, I know the tattoo itself isn’t perfect. I never expected it to be. The lines are a little rough and tattoo artist was decent, but not phenomenal and now the shading is faded so you can no longer see the rainbow. And still, I feel no guilt about the physical properties of my ink. Actually, I love every single thing about it. So why do I feel bad about the moment in which it was created? Continue reading The Devil Is (Not) In The Details

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning, The Day Itself | 70 Comments »