I am not that stressed about our wedding. Things are going reasonably well. We've got a lot already organised, but there are many things still to do. We need to order materials to make our invitations and orders of service, and then arrange a little "party" of friends and family to help us actually make them! I still need to sort out the flowers. My fiance still needs to sort out his suit. The bridal and bridesmaid accessories and shoes need to be sorted out. And the decorations for the reception venue, the menu for the dinner, and the drinks for the day also need to be organised. Oh, and the music for the reception. And favours need to be sorted. So there is still plenty to do. But look back over that list, figure out what we must have done already, and I don't think we're doing too badly. We have time to arrange these further details, and in many ways that's what they are: details.
The time I get stressed is when I make the mistake of comparing our wedding plans with those of other people's. A girl I knew from church at university got engaged just before Christmas. She and her fiance are getting married a month and a half after us. They, admittedly, will have had less time than us to organise things by the time it gets to their wedding. However, the frightening level of things already done has scared me somewhat. Thanks to the joy that is Facebook, and the regular updates, I have learnt just how much has been sorted - that, and she has a blog detailing it all. They've sorted out the bridesmaids' accessories already, I mean ARGH!!! Two of my best friends are also getting married this year. One the end of this month, and the other in mid-May. Thankfully, their wedding "stress" has been more on par with mine. One friend has managed to get an incredible amount done in time for the end of January - but then she had to! Another friend is on roughly a similar wavelength to me, we've got about similar amounts sorted, so I feel calmer when I chat to her. The girl I knew from university isn't a close friend, but we have a lot of mutual friends, and as I mentioned Facebook and blogs, you are able to hear a lot through the grapevine! I am happy for her and her fiance, and good for them having a short engagement. Ours is beginning to feel like a lifetime! - although there are very good reasons for that, which I shall detail in a further blog post. It's just, I can't deal with the uber organisation of another person when I am so disorganised myself!
The other frightening things, that send a chill down my spine, are bridal magazines. I had declared that I wouldn't read any - I mean, they're virtually a fiver each, and mostly full of adverts, and weddings are quite expensive enough thank you very much! But my mum's god-daughter, who is getting married at the beginning of May, gave her a load to give to me, which someone had previously given her. I wasn't horrified at now having bridal magazines in my possession, as I wanted some ideas for hairstyles, particularly for the bridesmaids, and all of these magazines seem to have hair specials! That, and they are all from 2004-2007, so I could ignore a lot of the articles. However, I have ended up reading some of the articles, partly out of curiosity, and they have just done more to scare me. According to the mags I should have started my bridal beauty regime 18 months before - uh-oh, we won't have even been engaged for that long! The list of things I should have done, and we should include, and what I should look like goes on and on... I should have stuck to my guns, and only looked at the pictures instead - the hair pictures have been helpful, and I'm grateful to my mum's god-daughter for giving me the magazines for that reason. Also, some of the real-life wedding stories have been inspirational, and can be quite a fun read. It's the advice pages that scare me out of my wits!
So, I have to be more realistic about things. About us. About our style. And how we're on the right track. We're doing things at our pace. We thrive on doing things at the last minute. It's how we both work. And it's how both achieved our highest marks at university - leaving it until the night and morning before! I'm not saying that we'll leave key wedding details until then - there is no way either sets of parents would allow it! But there are some things we'll probably only manage to finalise about two weeks before. But those things will be all the better for it. Because that's us, and that's how we do things. I know that the wedding we went to in June last year, our friends had left a few things that society would consider to be a little bit late in the day. But their wedding was fantastic so what difference did it make? In fact, it was probably better for being left to the last minute :D Then there is the wedding of some friends from university that I went to in Wales in August 2008. Arriving the Friday before with three of my good friends, we relaxed and enjoyed some food, and then suddenly we were whirled into the kitchen to stick the orders of service together, the NIGHT BEFORE! But they all came together - it helped us to bond with some of the other guests, who had also been called in to help, and on the day itself there was no way anyone could tell that the orders of service had only been matter of hours earlier.
The wedding industry is like some giant churning machine that threatens to crush you if you dare have one white frill out of place. I don't like it, and there are various things I have deliberately avoided because of it. For example, I have ordered my dress online. It will be custom made to fit my body specifications. I could not bear the thought of trawling round bridal shops trying on wedding dresses. As a result the designer of my dress is an incredibly personable woman, who has been very helpful and very enthusiastic, which is a great encouragement. The other thing that is helping us is that we're getting married at our church, so we know the rector well and we're friends of members of the band. This has helped immensely, because the whole thing is a lot more personal. The company in charge of our reception venue and catering are very professional, and they are used to doing weddings - perhaps they are the closest we've come to the 'wedding machine', but thankfully, as they are a local company who know the community well, they have a good idea of the kinds of things people like (like serving the local brew at the bar, and ensuring that local produce is on the menu), and they are very flexible. So really I haven't needed to become a victim of the wedding industry, because we have been developing clear ideas of what we want all along.
My fiance is still fine about it all. What I need to do is take a step back, stop comparing our wedding plans to other people's, and to enjoy this process. It's the marriage itself that we are most looking forward to, we just want a great party to seal our union. We'll be doing it our way, and that's the way to do it. The wedding industry can back off, because although we have to dip and dive into it for a few necessities, we can generally ignore it and its pushy ideas.
Here's not to wedding stress, but to wedding joy, for all the right reasons!
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