And now, a guest post by Kayla’s husband, Daniel!
Your wedding. It’s supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life. Everyone always says so.
If you’re like me, the amount of thought you, as a groom, have put into your wedding pales in comparison to the amount of thought that your bride has. I always just sort of thought of my wedding as something that would be wonderful and it would just happen. I knew we’d have to try food and stuff, and maybe pick some colors, but it didn’t look so hard.
I was then confronted with the terrible reality of the behind the scenes of weddings. There were vendors for every small aspect of the ceremony and the reception, and a thousand traditions that seem like things that might have happened at my family’s weddings before. Which ones were the traditions my family would expect? Where should I pay the ungodly full price? Where could I save some money so that our honeymoon would be fun as well?
At the time, both my wife and I were still in college as full-time students who also had jobs. A bit of a time commitment, to be sure, but I proposed about a year and a half out, and that seemed like enough time. Boy did I learn a lot.
#1) Planning a Wedding is an Actual Job
You know that thing you say to your co-workers when your boss walks in and asks for volunteers on the new project that you just know means extra work and unpaid overtime? “They don’t pay me enough to do that.” It’s similar to the old standby that you think to yourself when you watch Dirty Jobs: “You couldn’t pay me enough to do that.” Well there are plenty of those types of things that go along with planning a wedding.
This is where paying someone to take care of that comes in. Planners love weddings, they live and breathe all of the little things that don’t seem that important. For me, it was the font for our invitations. I didn’t know how to describe a good font, or what font family it came from or whatever. I knew I wanted something somewhat formal and loopy, but with a good looking capital D as my name is Daniel.
So my bride sent me font after font, website after website of different card makers and then I had to personally go through them all. It doesn’t sound too bad, but I started dreading any Facebook message from my wife with a fresh batch of five websites I should scour for fonts. A planner can do the tedious grunt work because life doesn’t pause for you to search website after website trying to settle on the perfect font, or champagne glasses, or cake topper.
#2) Worry and Insanity Kill the Love and Romance Vibe
The final month and then the actual day were avalanches of stress. All of the things we had decided on months and years ago started needing to be revisited. Like a true procrastinator, I had just decided on places and things and then forgotten about them, because the next time I needed to think about them was so far away.
All of a sudden we had to go back to the tux place and make sure all of the tuxes fit, make sure all of the vendors were getting paid at the right time, and give final timelines to everyone. It was very overwhelming.
And like I said before, life doesn’t stop while you try to figure out this momentous occasion. On the way to a tux fitting, my dad got into a car accident in the family van. Nobody was hurt, but the van was totaled. The wedding was already taking up everyone’s free time, and now there was a crisis that no one had time to handle. Talk about stressful!
Once the day actually came, someone had to make sure everyone was following the timeline. Since my bride and I had planned everything, we were the only ones with complete understanding of the timeline. Trust me, we tried to explain it to other people, but when you have spent months organizing something, you will always understand it better than someone who was only briefed in the last week.
This meant that I, the groom who was about to make the most important promise of his life to the most important person in his life about the rest of their lives, was stressing out trying to make sure everyone was there. Instead of thinking about the love-filled lives we were about to undertake, I was sweating about the fact that the cake was a half-hour late.
Your wedding day is supposed to be about you and your bride. The plain and simple fact is that if you are worrying and stressing about it going well, you aren’t enjoying it and loving your partner. Letting someone else take control, especially someone who has been with you every step of the way, sets your mind free to worry about other things, like whether or not you can remember your vows.
It’s your day! Let someone else take the reins. Just relax and feel the love!
#3) A Professional Almost Always Trumps an Amateur (That’s why they’re pros!)
Did you know there was a person who made massive advances in mathematics in a number of areas despite being essentially self-taught and having very little formal education? His name was Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was brilliant, and he was an example of an amateur who surpassed professionals in his field. For the rest of us, it is very rare that we will naturally be able to do something as well as someone who has repeatedly been paid to do that thing.
‘But this is artistic!’ you think to yourself. ‘Surely this means that it’s subjective! Maybe I can do as well as a pro!” Well, just because beauty is in the eye of the beholder doesn’t mean any beholder can step up and make some beauty. For example, remember that painting of Jesus that was “restored” by a local artist in Spain?
The real question is whether you are willing to risk your wedding day on the chance that you can beat the odds. That isn’t to say you don’t have any good ideas. But a good planner facilitates your ideas in a much more efficient way using the benefits of experience that most people don’t want to have. Not a lot of couples leave a wedding thinking about what they’ll do better next time.
A planner’s experience can translate the cool thing your bride showed you on Pinterest into a fully-fledged idea made possible by vendors you didn’t know existed using techniques you couldn’t have figured out in the two days you would have given yourself to figure it out right before the wedding. They can sort through all those customs, keep track of all the vendors, and make sure all the little things are right in a way that you couldn’t duplicate on your own.
So just get a planner! Then you can actually enjoy your actually happy wedding day.