Once the excitement fades from getting engaged, it’s time for reality to sink in. You have a wedding to plan! You’re more than likely aware that this can be an incredibly stressful undertaking. If you want to ensure that you’ll enjoy the wedding when the time comes, you’ll need to minimize your levels of stress. Here are a few tips for doing just that.
Make a Timeline
Whether your wedding is large or small, local, or a destination wedding, you need a timeline to follow. There are quite a few tools for planning weddings online – including free wedding websites – but even though these make this enterprise easier to navigate, a timeline can help. A timeline is sort of like an outline for a writing project. It can help you stay on track and tells you exactly what needs to be done when.
Throw Out Tradition
You may want a white wedding, but then again you may not. There are quite a few traditions that are associated with getting married, and a lot of us may not have any idea where those traditions came from. The wedding industry has been built on incorporating an ever-increasing number of time-consuming and expensive elements into the process, but these aren’t ideas you necessarily need to buy into.
Staying with those traditions that are meaningful to you is what will make your wedding special while also keeping a lot of the stress out of it. Think hard about which traditions you’ll want to retain, especially when it has to do with traditions that need to be done on the day itself.
Budgeting
Do a bit of research before you start planning and set a budget that’s realistic for the wedding. Be sure to include an emergency fund of at least a 5% cushion. That said, stick to your budget. This emergency fund should be for events that are unforeseen, not just to spend when you run out of money in the budget. Money worries can add to the stress that leads up to the wedding if you let them, so even if you don’t do anything else to relieve a bit of stress, you should do this.
Just Say No
Friends and family members can often attempt to interfere with the planning of your wedding – especially if they happen to be the ones financing it. Attempt to remind them that you and your partner happen to be the ones getting married. This can be difficult but stand your ground. You might also give them some sort of task that will get them out of your way. There will be times when they’ll be more satisfied if they feel like they have control over at least a small part of the planning. Just make sure that this is something you don’t have any trouble letting them handle.
Throughout the years, it seems as if weddings have become ever more complicated. Just keep in mind that yours doesn’t necessarily need to be like that if you don’t want it to be. Weddings are essentially about two people who are choosing to make a total commitment to each other. This event is traditionally combined with the added bonus of being the largest party they might ever have for their family and friends. If you simply keep your focus on this, relax and try to make sure that everything is as simple as it can possibly be, then your wedding should go off as planned and without any unforeseen circumstances.Â
Good luck and many felicitations of the day!