Reducing Wedding Stress

When wedding stress hit me hard, I hated that every advice column said “Hire a planner!”

Girl. That is not in the budget. I’ve overcome the wedding stress, and we’re only a few weeks to the Big Day, but it wasn’t easy. Here’s some things I did to help.

Choose professionals you trust, and let them work.

I do not want to worry about micromanaging our officiant, our florist, our photographer, our caterer, our baker…I do not have time or energy for that. Part of choosing vendors is letting them do their jobs. I gave our vendors a lot of flexibility, and it helped. Choose people that you can trust to do what they’re best at, and take that straight off of your mind. “Will they do a good enough job??” Doesn’t matter, you already picked them out and paid for them. It’s a done deal.

Wedding planning only happens one day a week.

It’s easy to let wedding planning become your whole life and everything that you talk about. What helped us was to designate a day that was for wedding planning…well, actually two days. I set aside Sunday mornings and Monday afternoons to do all of my emails, calls, buying…everything. As we get closer, this has started to bleed over into other days, but it definitely helped for months!

Make your fiance do it.

I know that culutrally, the bride does most of the wedding planning. That is totally not required. I made a list of things I was not going to do, and passed them off entirely to the other person who is supposed to be getting married. Just like trusting your vendors, I chose to trust Charles with some elements to plan.

Get organized.

We have a spot in our guest room that is the wedding zone, where all of the wedding crap goes. I also have a spreadsheet to keep track of everything from the budget to the guest list and beyond. Between these two things, it’s been giving me a ton of peace of mind to make sure that things aren’t getting lost or falling through the cracks.

Choose the things you’re willing to stress over.

If you stress over every single thing that’s going to happen at the wedding, you’ll run yourself into the ground. Charles and I picked a few things that we really wanted to be amazing and put all of our effort into those. If it wasn’t one of those things, then we were willing to compromise. It also helped that a lot of our lower-priorities were shifted onto people and vendors that we trust.

Happy planning and keep it stress-free!