A bride's perspective: How to stay sane and grounded while wedding planning.
"How I stay sane and grounded while wedding planning"- By bride to be Katherine
In the age of Pinterest, DIY budget hacks, and Instagram perfect shots, beautiful wedding aesthetics for building your “perfect day” are available at your fingertips. It’s hard, therefore, not to constantly think about and want to change your wedding details and décor. Not to mention being a “COVID Bride” with now even more time to plan (read: dwell) on every. last. detail.
I can feel mounting pressure from planning a destination wedding that was postponed 11 months. I think “people have already been thinking about our wedding for almost a year, and now there is another year for the hype and excitement to build.” Add that with the fact that people are traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to attend our wedding. We don’t want to disappoint anyone!
So, how do I stay sane? One thing I try to come back to is advice I read in the initial planning stages of our wedding from The Knot Book of Wedding Lists. Chapter 1 of the book asks you to discuss with your partner “the three most important elements for each of you”. For my fiancé and I, we decided the most important to us was our guests having a great time (which translated to 1. the right DJ and 2. having an open bar set-up) and having memories to last a lifetime (3. photography/videography). The other thing we have prioritized is wanting our guests to leave our big day feeling our love for each other. This has meant we have spent a lot of time building out the content of our wedding ceremony.
While it is extremely hard not to over-think every detail, when I find myself stressing out about name plates or linens (or [insert small detail here]), I try to remember what we decided was important to us! Remembering that list helps to make the small decisions much easier. When we look back at our photos in 10 years, I like to think we will smile (let’s be real, I will probably cry) about how happy we were in that moment and not how ADORABLE the head table looks in front of us. And when our guests talk about our wedding for years to come, I hope they talk about how they danced the night away with us and wanted it to never end (and maybe even almost missed their flights home).
Katherine met her fiancé, Iavor just before high school and it took years of friendship and degrees from different colleges for them to realize just how right they were for each other. They have been together since 2015 and were engaged on the 4th of July 2019 during a weekend of celebration with their closest friends in Glen Arbor, Michigan. They live in the East Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago and are getting married July 2021 along the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria.
Engagement photo by Melissa Ivy Photography https://melissaivy.com/.
