Take Back Your Wedding:

Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning

WHOSE WEDDING IS IT?

Elizabeth enjoyed wedding chat rooms during her engagement, finding them a source of moral support and good ideas. But she saw one form of bad advice repeated over and over to couples who were struggling with family and friends over decisions on everything from guest lists to the timing and location of the wedding: IT’S YOUR WEDDING, SO YOU DO IT YOUR WAY. This advice, shared as a form of common sense, was even stronger if the couple was paying for that part of the wedding.

So what’s wrong with having it your own way if it’s your wedding? The problem is that weddings are as much about community as about the couple. They have been that way in every culture throughout human history. If you don’t want your wedding to be about your community of family and friends, then elope and have the justice of the peace’s spouse be your witness. (You will just have to deal with your family and community later.) If you want to have a wedding and not just a legal ceremony, then it can’t be just about you and your own preferences. It can be hard to see in the midst of negotiations with the caterer over the corking fee for the wine, but weddings are the beginning of life long bonds with a new, extended family. Not just the wedding day itself when the new clan is assembled—every stage of the planning forges a new family and community, for better or worse.

Guest lists, for example, are not just about the bride and groom’s fantasy of an ideal size for a wedding, but also about both families reaching out to their networks of kin and friends, bringing them into the inner circle. Suppose one of your fathers owns a small business, considers his employees part of his “family,” and wants to invite them to the wedding. You don’t know most of them and don’t relish having “strangers” at your wedding. However you resolve this matter (it involves money and space in addition to sentiment and loyalty), our point is that a bad way to settle it is by saying, IT’S OUR WEDDING, SO WE WILL DO IT OUR WAY.

Rejecting the “it’s just for us” myth does not mean adopting the reverse: “Just go along and keep everyone happy.” Since you are the ones getting married, you are the principal stakeholders if not the only ones. You don’t have to let your mother make your wedding the one she had hoped for herself but was denied by her own mother. Your father, who likes to stress his power over the checkbook, should not have unilateral veto power. No parent should get away with manipulations to keep an ex-spouse out of the limelight. Your aunt Sophie may think that she can bake the best wedding cake in the state, but that does not equate to a decision that she will make your cake.

Doing it your way or their way may appear to be the easier paths because you don’t have to deal directly with differences. But you miss the opportunity to start a new life together by working on the challenges in front of you with the people who will be in your life until theirs or your dying breaths. So we propose a different wedding motto: IT’S OUR WEDDING AND YOU’RE AN IMPORTANT PART OF IT, SO LET’S FIGURE IT OUT TOGETHER.

Tags: Parents, Conflict, Communication

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- Elizabeth Doherty Thomas, is a co-founder of The First Dance, along with Marriage and Family therapist father Dr. William J. Doherty. The First Dance was a Modern Bride Trendsetter award winner in 2007 for taking on the complex family dynamics of wedding planning. Read Take Back Your Wedding: Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning for more advice on working through the people stresses of wedding planning as a couple, with your families, and how to strengthen your upcoming marriage through this enormous first task of married life.