Take Back Your Wedding: Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning

 

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We are reminded of something a mayor of a large city said when a critic complained that the streets of the city were dangerous.  The mayor shot back:  “There’s nothing dangerous about the streets in this city.  It’s the people….”  The same could be said about weddings:  there is nothing that can’t be planned and carried off well—if only the people pull together.  If they don’t, the path towards the altar is a minefield.  We wrote this book to help you avoid minefields and to walk safely through ones you can’t avoid.

SO MANY DECISIONS, SO MANY PEOPLE

With the possible exception of building a house together, there is nothing in a couple’s life that involves more decisions, small and large, than a wedding.  All of these decisions are interconnected, with the first decisions, sometimes easy to make, producing headaches later.  For example, your favorite place for a reception is miraculously free, so you book it—only to learn later that the church your favorite clergyperson has moved to is 35 miles away and the reception hall will not accommodate the number of family friends your in-laws want to invite.   

Each decision in planning a wedding has stakeholders other than the bride and groom; in other words, lots of important people have strong feelings about nearly every aspect of your wedding.  They care not only about what is decided but also about how they were involved in the decision.  Sometimes they care deeply that someone else, like an ex-spouse, be kept out of the decision making. 

Even if you are paying for the wedding yourselves, relatives and friends will have their opinions, feelings, and maybe rivalries.  But if parents are footing the bill, their stake is higher and the negotiations even trickier.  In fact, it may only be the honeymoon that couples choose more or less on their own, with other people mostly staying out of the decision—unless, of course, someone else is footing the bill. 

All of this is complicated even if both of you come from intact two parent families, because weddings bring together two different families and their networks of friends.  The complexities are magnified in post-divorce families, where four families may come together to re-enact old dramas of power and control.  The bride and groom can be caught up in loyalty struggles over everything from the names on wedding invitations to toasts at the reception.  On the positive side, dealing well with these complex family relationships during the wedding planning can set the stage for healthier future relationships with family members.  This book will help you achieve that goal.

Then there is your own relationship as a couple.  How are you going to manage the decisions and the people as you plan your wedding?  Announcing your engagement is really the beginning of your marriage, because from that moment on you have serious decisions to make—and you now have in-laws.  In making wedding decisions, you will have to figure out what kind of team you want to be, which tasks you will share and which you will handle separately.  Before you can deal well with family and friends, you must have your own act together.  As we will discuss later, no matter how you divide up responsibilities—whether traditionally or in your own unique way—each of you will have to take the lead with your own family.  A particularly bad way to start a marriage is to expect the bride to handle the difficult conversations with the groom’s family, or vice versa. 

 

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