Two Months Out

I haven’t talked for a while about the effing hard parts of planning a wedding, the parts that make me cry, the parts that make me wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I get freaked out, I get anxious, and I hope I’m not the only one who does. Please share your wedding anxiety in the comments so we/I can feel less alone! Because I think honesty is the best way to shed a little light in the darkness, this is how I’m feeling these days:

Sometimes planning our wedding I get so lost in what other people want for me that I can’t see my way out, I can’t see what I want. I get scared that I’ll show up at our wedding, and it won’t be the wedding that we need, that it won’t celebrate who we really are. I wake up in the middle of the night scared that I’ll show up on our wedding day and everyone will have misunderstood us and that there will be a garter toss, some ritual cake smashing, piles of formal pictures, that people will insist that I throw my bouquet to the next to wed, and none of it will reflect who we are. And on those days, I go back and revisit some of my favorite weddings… I try to breathe in brides who were able to celebrate fully who they are on their wedding day, who were able to revel in the joy of finding a partner to spend the rest of their lives in.

What I want is to feel like I’m not alone in all this. I ask my married friends if getting married ever made them anxious, and most of them tell me that everything will work out in the end, which I know. But what I want to hear the most is – I was scared too. Because it’s not just the wedding that I’m freaked about, I’m scared that I’ll get married and I will wake up the next morning with a one way ticket to a house in the suburbs, a minivan, and taking care of kids all day while I make sure the house is tidy when my husband comes home from work. I’m scared of losing ourselves. I’m scared of loosing our passion for life. I’m scared of having a passionless wedding and having a passionless marriage.

Two months out and I’m anxious. This process of planning our wedding has been a process of finding myself, of finding ourselves. It’s given us the power to say, “No, that’s not right for us,” and “Yes, this is how we want to live our lives.” But now, as the invitations go out, and the wedding becomes not just our thing anymore, I’m scared that the power of ‘how things are done’ will overcome ‘how we are doing things.’

And I think maybe, just maybe, that this is ok. I think that trying to live truthfully is hard, and it takes bravery. My Grandfather, who was a Colonel in the Marine Corps, used to say that being brave didn’t mean not being scared – that not being scared was stupid. He always said that being brave was being scared but doing it anyway. So here we go… here we go.

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