reclaiming wife

Posts Tagged ‘Wedding Zen’

You may remember Rachael from her Wedding Undergraduate post this spring about Communication and Patience and the pre-engaged state. Rachael is a writer and editor, so it's no surprise that her Wedding Graduate story is one of importance. She speaks about battling anxiety (been there) and how her wedding day unfolded as liquid luck and pure joy. This is a must read story even if you have no weddings in your near future. It's a story of unexpected perfection and finding beauty in the cracks of life.

the accidentally perfect wedding

This is the story of how I accidentally had kind of a perfect wedding where I basically loved everything and everyone and nothing really went wrong.

the accidentally perfect weddingMy boyfriend Joe and I got engaged last December after eight years of dating. Back then, in the first days of winter, I felt prepared. Thanks largely to this very blog, I was armed to the teeth with wisdom and insight and plans for how to finagle a meaningful, sanely-planned celebration of our love out of the horrific mess that is the modern wedding industry. I knew about the preposterousness of dresses, the pitfalls of getting too wrapped up in centerpieces, the brain-poisoning allure of wedding blogs and the very real potential of unwittingly alienating my husband-to-be by becoming consumed with all of the above. I knew that I could ask our friends and family to move mountains and that they'd happily oblige, but also that they wouldn't (shouldn’t, couldn’t) stop being their wonderful, imperfect, human selves just for our wedding. I knew things could, and would, go wrong.

the accidentally perfect wedding

And much as I knew I couldn't expect weather or people or immutable facts of the universe to change just because it was my wedding, I also knew I couldn't expect myself to change just because it was my wedding. I knew that as long as Joe and I were married at the end of the day nothing else really mattered.

But I also didn’t want to look back on one of the most significant days of my life and see the whole thing through a sickly, gray fog.

Accidentally Perfect Wedding

All my life I've suffered from some degree of anxiety and its attendant panicky spells and hazy funks, some as brief as an afternoon and others lingering for weeks. Things are better now than they were a few years ago, mostly because I’m on a bit of medication and because I finally allowed myself to call my problem by its name and start thinking of it as a thing I could mostly control and not something that had me at its every beck and call.*

These days my anxiety is kind of like a moth caught under a lampshade across the room—I can tell it's there and sometimes it flutters and knocks around and distracts me but most of the time it lets me sit in peace. Still, I was worried. I was worried about being worried, because as many things as I knew I needed to brace myself for, I hadn't planned a wedding before, let alone my own wedding, and I didn't know what the huge amounts of stress (or the huge amounts of joy) might do to me.

Early on, Joe and I told our families that we didn’t want to lose our minds over the wedding and that we didn’t want anyone else to, either. It helped a lot, I think, to establish that. (It helped even more to just have great families to begin with.) To manage the logistical stressors, I did what I’ve almost always done to manage huge projects: I became hyper-planny, sussing out everything that needed to be done and everything that could potentially go wrong and working to work around those gone-wrong things before they even happened, all while knowing full well that everything could still go wrong anyway. This is technically called “defensive pessimism” but my preferred term is “pre-stressing,” which is kind of like “pre-gaming” but with less booze (although, actually, there was plenty of booze, especially after one of our bridesmaids threw us a stock-the-bar shower, a move that I totally recommend regardless of your chosen anxiety-management habits).

I feel like I should make this clear: I was pre-stressing, and I was also just-regular-stressing, but I wasn’t stressed out. This was the first time I really learned that there was a difference. I was, for the most part, enjoying myself and finding the whole planning process to be fun and exciting and challenging and rewarding. But there was also this low-grade humming pressure, this knowledge that things needed to be done, that people needed to be told what to do, that decisions needed to be made and plans enacted. Outwardly, I was pretty composed; even at the rehearsal dinner, I remember strutting past some family members and one of them exclaimed, “You’re just the calmest bride!” This was funny because at that moment I felt anything but calm—happy and honored and surrounded by a whole shit ton of love, yes, but not calm. So I replied with something like, “Heh, it’s called being DRUNK,” which I totally was not, but which proved inconvenient minutes later when I decided it was time for me to leave and they were all, “No, but you’re drunk!”

the accidentally perfect wedding

But beyond pre-stressing and surrounding myself with an amazing support group, I felt there wasn’t much I could do to make sure I was at my best on the actual day of the actual wedding. I tried to remember to drink water and get enough sleep. I tried to remember to thank everyone as much as I could and to remember the point of it all was to have fun and be married to Joe at the end. I decided I would just have to feel however I felt, however gnarly and off-kilter it might be. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Rachael & Joe

I've started to get a whole new class of emails asking for advice. I call them the, "So-and-so offered to plan my wedding and all I have to do is show up, and I really don't want to plan a wedding, but somehow it seems wrong to take them up on it—is it WRONG?" emails. And my answer is always, "DEAR GOD. LET THEM PLAN YOUR WEDDING." Think about it. Just a generation or two ago, the bride's family always planned the wedding. It's only our current obsession with *personalization* that puts the burden squarely on the bride (and sometimes the groom), so what's wrong with letting your community throw a party to honor you? Which is just what Emily & Aaron did when their roommates offered to plan things. And oh boy, was that the right decision. And Emily wore a Betsey Johnson wedding dress, which is also always clearly the right decision.

My husband and I didn’t plan our wedding. From day one, we handed it almost entirely off to our loved ones, and that turned out to be the best decision we made.

When Aaron and I decided to get married, the last thing I wanted to do was plan a wedding. To make a long story short, we’d been together for six years and were completely committed, but we wanted to wait to get married until our gay friends could do so as well. Then we started looking into joining the Peace Corps. Immediately our passion for service came up against our dedication to equality: In order to apply to the Peace Corps together, we needed to be married for at least one year. When it came right down to it, we agreed that we don't want to look back on our lives sixty years from now and see "what ifs." We decided to go for it.

Easier said than done! Add my issues with marriage equality to the fact that I’m not one of those women who can discuss wedding colors with my friends as though we’re on the United Nations Security Council, and you can imagine how excited I was about planning a wedding.

Here's where the real heroes of our wedding story come in: Our roommates. They are sisters, two of our closest friends, and an absolute blast to share a house with. They also happen to have über type-A personalities and a serious love affair with stress. The original wedding plan, as we ran it by the roomies in June, was: "We're going to the courthouse in August, and then we'll have a barbeque at the house afterward. No big deal." This was met with two sets of eyes rolling and "Just leave it to us." Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Emily & Aaron

It's hard for me to not fall deeply in love with a wedding in a half-finished tobacco warehouse, where the couple served Indian food (why doesn't everyone do this?), and where the pictures are gorgeous. But that's not the kicker on this Wedding Graduate post. The kicker is that Jessica is smart, and her advice is so dead-on, that it's hard not to fall head over heels in love with the whole thing...

Wedding planning opens the floodgates for advice… advice from Mom, Grandma, sisters, soon-to-be family, long-lost family, good friends, work friends, frenemies, colleagues, ladies at the grocery store, bloggers, bloggees, and just about anyone else out there. It’s exhausting. And, you know what, most of it can (and perhaps should) be ignored. So, as I am about to do some advising of my own, please—I invite you—to make your own path. Don’t do everything I say; it’s your wedding—for you, your partner, and your newly joined families and dear ones. Just do what feels right and have confidence in your vision.

Early in our planning, I read a post on APW in which a commenter said, “The theme of our wedding is marriage.” Matt and I loved that; we wanted something that felt inclusive, authentic, and bursting with love, without excessive pageantry or unmanageable expense. And, though certainly our marriage was the reason for the day, we would say that the “theme” of our wedding was community. As we transitioned from sort-of-adults (i.e. grad students) to adults-full-stop, it was our desire to use our wedding weekend as a way to express our gratitude to all of the family, friends, mentors, and advisers without whose support we would not be even half of what we are. We wanted all of these dear people to feel welcomed, appreciated, and loved… and we wanted them to have a blast. That’s a tall order…

What did we learn planning a community wedding on a small budget, while simultaneously starting our first job (Matt), graduating from medical school (Jessica), and buying a house? Well...

North Carolina community wedding

Stop Worrying About Whether Your Guests Will “Get It.” I worried and worried throughout our planning that our guests would not “understand” our wedding. What does that even mean? Well, I worried that they wouldn’t be able to find our ceremony venue (a still-being-renovated downtown warehouse), that they wouldn’t "get" the Indian food that we served at the reception (we love spicy things and Indian catering was affordable); I worried that they would wonder why our secular ceremony didn’t look like all the other wedding ceremonies they remembered, and that they would begrudge us our cake table, since we didn’t have a true "wedding cake," etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

On the day of the wedding, I kept worrying.  I worried that guests couldn’t hear our officiant’s gorgeous words during the ceremony; I worried that more people weren’t dancing; I worried that no one understood the toast that I thought was so heartwarming.

And, fact of the matter is, that worry pulled me from the moment. It brought stress to an otherwise blissful night. And—perhaps worst of all—it was unfounded. Numerous unsolicited comments in the days and weeks after the wedding showed me that my worries were not only off-the-mark, but in fact totally unnecessary. Our guests "got" it; they understood.


What I realize now is that, I didn’t give my guests enough credit. These are "our people." They know us and they recognized and appreciated our sensibilities all over this wedding. So, when you plan your wedding, know this: these are your wedding guests—people you know well and love. They’ll “get it.” You have my word on that. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Jessica & Matt

You want a perfect wedding? Well. I think today's wedding might be as close as it gets. It's not perfect in a single traditional sense (no white dress, no big party, no details to speak of, only a few weeks to plan), but it's perfect in the ways that matter. They decided they didn't want to live without each other, they braved multi-national legalities, they planned a wedding in a few weeks that reflected them. Plus, I have a huge soft spot for the ladies who thought they would never marry and then decided they could rock marriage in their own damn way, just like everything else in their lives.

I had never given much thought to a wedding, or even marriage. I pictured myself as one of those mature women who wears red dresses and big floppy hats with large sunglasses and sips wine on sidewalk cafes with a book by her side, with lots of cats waiting at home, or perhaps making time before she meets with her current and not permanent beau. But married? Nope.


Half a year before our wedding, my boyfriend of four years and I decided to split up after I moved to Costa Rica, when we realized that traveling back and forth was completely out of our budget. He had mentioned the option of marrying in a Mr. Darcy way—not the "I ardently love you" proposal but the "against my better judgement" one. I was in shock at first and then shot it down as more trouble than it would be worth and had a dozen different reasons as to why it didn't make sense when neither one of us has ever been "the marrying kind." A couple of months later we discussed the more realistic possibility of him traveling to Costa Rica on a tourist visa, finding work and a way to make his stay more permanent. We even joked about getting married to buy time while they sorted the paperwork out. Two weeks later when his visa application for Costa Rica was rejected, we had to think fast and plan. And then it became crystal clear to me, in a way that it hadn't before, that although I could live without him, I didn't want to. He made my life better, and I wanted him with me. So I proposed and he said yes. It might be good to mention that all these conversations took place on an instant messaging client while we were sitting miles and miles away from each other.

I told my parents, he told his. Due to study and work issues, I could only take a month to go to Colombia, plan the wedding and get married. Getting married in Colombia requires quite a mountain of paperwork and I had to be there in person to hand it in and then get approved to schedule the wedding date. We had to jump through legal hoops and over hurdles, but in the end, I got him some papers so my fiance was able to act in my name, and we had a wedding date. We also had less than six weeks to plan.

Planning this wedding had very little to do with the fluffy bits: decorations, food, flowers, dresses, cards and invitations, engagement photo shoots or gift registries. It had to do with practicality, with simplicity and a lot with boring things like running around the city getting paperwork signed and stamped in different offices and then getting them mailed off. We had long conversations over skype and through chat about our personal goals and expectations of married life and one of the important items had to do with money. We decided two things: we would pay for the wedding ourselves, even if that meant having a really small wedding, and we would not get into debt to have the wedding. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Juliana & Joan

Today's wedding is an honest-to-goodness summer camp wedding with a s'more cake (!!!) and lake swimming. But that's not what makes it awesome. What makes it awesome is Emma's discussion of the true nature of weddings, how you learn from them, and how she learned to balance the fact that it was their wedding, and everyone's day. It's smart and fun at the very same time, and what could be better than that?

Weddings are funny things. They are everything you might expect and nothing you can see coming. That is just as it should be, because they are what they are. And that's all I can come up with to say: they are what they are. Embrace it or prepare for a sh*tstorm (not because everything will go wrong, but because they will not be whatever you want them to be).

One of my biggest struggles (which isn't saying much because I was unbelievably lucky to have an almost-painless process) was determining when it should be about me/my fiance/us, and when it simply wasn't. There are definitely times that you must accept that even though everyone says it's all about you, it really has almost nothing to do with you.

Enter showers. With my bridal party 100% out of town and my desire to have everyone watch me open presents at 0%, I felt as though showers might be a necessary evil, but hopefully would be kept small. After all, showers stem from the bride's family needing dowry help (lame!), and they seem like a weird way to finagle double gifts out of women (no fair!). But as four showers grew from an astounding amount of support and excitement, I began to realize their purpose.

Would we see all of our guests at our wedding? No, we invited almost 400. Are having these pre-parties a vital chance to celebrate with new and old friends and families alike, answer questions about the event, and let people express their genuine love and support of you? Yes! So wade through the awkward present-opening, graciously defend your simplistic lifestyle when everyone gives you a hard time about your registry not being big enough, suck it up and play hostess because even though someone else might be throwing it, you are the only one who knows everyone, write your thank you notes with genuine appreciation, and hope that at least one of these groups is willing to call theirs what it is: a sprinkle (not a full shower, but rather a potluck lunch and decoration work party with a group gift thrown in for good measure).

But when it's time for you to take the reins again, go for it. Don't get stuck in people-pleasing mode and start trying to invent some weird bachelorette party that has to fit into two hours on a weekday that you don't want because it's on a wedding checklist somewhere. Step back, realize that it's your call again, and have a lovely night with your wedding party who came in a day early to eat Indian food and go run last minute errands with you. No penis necklaces required, thanks.

My husband (still weird to type) and I met working at summer camp. We were both campers, on staff for six summers, and now volunteer and donate regularly. We had our reception at said camp. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Emma & Kyle

Kenya Wedding

For those of you that read Manya's post about the wedding she should have called off (pro-tip: if you haven't read it, you must), you won't be surprised that her wedding graduate post is well written, and so emotional it will make you cry. But what will surprise you are the hilarious mishaps: American Doll Passport Mix-Ups and Fingers Bitten By Baby Elephants. Things that could ruin a wedding, if you let them, but instead infused Manya's wedding with richness and wisdom. So without further ado, an absolute must read about how weddings form brand-new families (kids included).

Kenya Wedding

I was in love with our wedding long before it started to take physical form. I am a closet artist and had months of fun curating, designing, crafting, writing and organizing a visual and emotional vintage travel dream (think Out of Africa meets The English Patient). Good thing, because since we live in Nairobi, Kenya, we had to be resourceful and do most everything ourselves. I did well remembering during The Event the details would blur into impressionistic irrelevance, so I made sure to enjoy the heck out of the Safari of pulling it all together.

Kenya Wedding

But what I worried a lot about was letting go. Every wedding grad post tells you to Let Go. They say it as if it is as simple as taking a breath. But there’s a difference between knowing something in your brain and knowing how to do it (hint: breathing is a good start, and having a great wedding coordinator/stage manager is a good finish).

Kenya Wedding

The week before the wedding, a few things happened that gave me a crash course on letting go.

First, the dry cleaner lost my wedding dress. After I finally convinced them that I truly had not already picked it up, that I would remember doing that, we spent a frantic hour calling the plant and all other outlets, and then searching every single bundle of laundry. We finally found it tucked inside of some CEO’s parcel that was ready to be collected that night. Up until that moment, I had been obsessing about whether my dress was perfect/beautiful/ slimming/(insert your own adjective) enough. I was stressed that I wasn’t completely in love with it. But after this, I was just damn grateful it was there, it fit, and it was mine. (And I fell in love with it too, by the way).

Kenya Wedding

Second, my parents brought doll passports to the airport instead of their own and missed their flight. I wish that were a joke. I have a little adopted sister who is really into the American Girls dolls, and those things are pimped out with crazy-ass accessories. My sis had carefully packed them for the long trip from Maine to Kenya, and they even have realistic-looking passports that are so cute… right up until you present them at the check-in counter and they don’t let you on the flight, and there are no more seats on any flight to Kenya until after the wedding.

Miraculously, a Virgin Atlantic supervisor saw my mom crying at the counter in London and produced three boarding passes (wedding magic alert!). I had been anxious about my folks’ visit being perfect, whether we would get my dad a Panama hat on time, etc., etc., etc. In that 24 hours when they were in limbo, I had to get square with possibly walking my own self down the aisle. When they finally did arrive, I was no longer worried about them approving of my life, or their political leanings stressing me out. I was just damn grateful that they were there. And that attitude made their visit one of the best we’ve ever had.

Kenya Wedding

Third, I was bitten by a baby elephant and thought for a couple hours that I might lose my pinky finger. No sh*t. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Manya & Brian