Wedding Planning: Guide for Dummies

Planning a wedding is often a painstaking thing, as aside from the fact that you need to take care of all the organizational moments, you need to make sure that your relationship won’t be spoiled. Yes, people delve that deep into the wedding planning ideas and get obsessed with the ceremony per se that they actually forget the reason behind that all. So, the very first thing that many people are afraid of before planning their wedding is Murphy’s law, according to which anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

You know how it goes, there are some friends and relatives that are not that happy about your prospective marriage, and they try to poison you against each other. Then your wedding ceremony exceeds your budget expectations. Then you cannot decide on the flowers for the ceremony. Then you think about firing the wedding planner that your friends advised you to hire and hiring someone else. Then the dress gets dirty. Then someone gets drunk and starts the fight right before you’re about to say, “I do.”

If those are the thoughts that start torturing you when you think about planning your wedding, then you simply don’t know where to start when planning a wedding. Well, most likely you are starting from the wrong point, and the wrong start easily leads to Murphy’s law consequences. To free you from your headache, we offer you to check out our wedding planning guide, which will help you prepare for one of the most important steps in your life.

How to Start Planning a Wedding

Now, let’s figure out how to start planning a wedding. Now, please out that wedding planning checklist aside, forget about the wedding dress and the flowers for the ceremony. Take a deep breath and ask yourself, whether you are ready for the marriage. If the answer is positive, then you need to start preparing yourself mentally for your wedding. What, did you expect wedding planning for dummies to include, what flowers should decorate your ceremony? Well, you’re not prepared mentally, so put the flowers aside for the minute. So, let’s go through your mental checklist.

1. Replace “Me” with “We”

If you are constantly thinking about your wedding ceremony, while wondering hysterically why your partner does absolutely nothing, things are pretty messy. That’s not how to start wedding planning. Don’t use arguments like, “I’m trying my best, while you are doing nothing” as a wedding planning tool. You need to get rid of “me” in your vocabulary if your actual goal is to spend life with your partner. Change it for “we.” Otherwise, you are forgetting about your relationship in favor of a ceremony, which in this case would be nothing but a soap bubble. Remember that wedding matters for “me,” but for “we” wedding is just a small event in the long story of your romantic relationship. So, if you didn't switch from “me” to “we” before the wedding, you should switch right now, as all that wedding planning hysteria is worthless.

2. Start Adjusting

In case if you never practiced living together before the wedding ceremony, you should start adjusting. The life of a single person and the life of a couple living together differ greatly obviously. You need to be ready to compromise, as now there are two of you, and you need to manage that your mutual life will be suitable for both of you. Well, that’s unless you are going to practice the walking marriage.

3. Be Open-Minded and Keep Calm

You need to be open-minded and flexible, as everything can happen during your wedding preparation. You need to be flexible and open-minded not to get hysterical and spoil your own wedding ceremony. Just keep calm and don’t even think of considering anything as a catastrophe.

4. Pick a Proper Role Model

Another thing that you should do before your wedding preparation chores, is to pick the proper role model for your future life as a couple. Yes, we love our parents, and we like duplicating their lives, but you need to think twice before doing it. If your parents weren’t happy in their marriage and got divorced, it is better to avoid them as a role model for your future life of a married couple.

5. Attend Premarital Courses

If you want to make sure that you are doing everything right, and your partner finds this article ridiculous, you should start attending premarital courses before you go checking another article on planning a wedding on a small budget. Attending those courses will help you figure out whether you are ready for your marriage, and if not completely, what needs to be improved.

Communicating During Wedding Planning

Now you need to figure out how to communicate with your significant other during your wedding planning. Your wedding preparation is the most difficult and demanding period of your relationship if you play it wrong. You are both extremely vulnerable and find your wedding preparation to be exhausting, and it is really easy to start blaming each other and think that it’s all useless. So, here are some communication tips.

1. Be Forgiving

You need to be forgiving, as you both are nervous, fearing that the wedding may get out of hand. There is no need for arguing and blaming each other for anything. Even if some of your partner’s affords fall flat on their face, you need to be forgiving. If you can’t be forgiving during preparation for your wedding, what do you expect from your marriage?

2. Mind That Both of You Are Marrying

Speaking about forgiveness, you need to consider the fact that after your wedding, there’s going to be two of you is not only de facto but also de jure. Basically, you can consider yourself as an official couple on the preparation stage. Whenever you are getting hysterical because you are worried about your wedding, mind that your partner is marrying too. Thus, he or she is nervous as well. The sooner you realize that both of you are marrying, the better it is for your future relationship.

3. Support Each Other

Last but not least, you need to support each other. If you support each other, a lot of problems with wedding planning will pass unnoticed. You could easily find a way to laugh it all away. So, be a couple in life before you get documents that make you a couple officially.

Wedding Planning Checklist

Now, after putting all this psychological stuff aside, it is time to get into practical wedding planning tips. So, let’s go through the steps of planning a wedding without further ado.

1. Determine Your Budget

The very first thing that you need to start is to determine your budget. Planning a wedding on a budget is much easier as you will be able to figure out your limitations. Which means that you will be able to figure out what venue to reserve and what wedding planner you can afford to hire.

2. Make a Guest List

The second step after determining your budget is making your wedding list. You know what kind of wedding you want and what kind of wedding you can offer. If you are planning a small ceremony, then you should invite only your closest friends and relatives. If you opt for something more pompous, then you know that your wedding guest list may include from fifty to two hundred people. With the pompous wedding starts the dilemma whether you’ve forgotten to invite someone or not.

3. Hire a Wedding Planner

Now, after determining your wedding budget and making a guest list, you can finally hire the wedding planner. Your wedding planner depends on the budget. If you want your wedding planner to solve all your problems and do all the chores for you, he or she is going to be expensive. Some of them will hire everyone from waiters to the lighting technician. Yes, freeing yourself from a headache can make you pay extra.

4. Decide the Overall Theme

Together with your wedding planner, you start deciding on the overall theme of your wedding. Some prefer humble ceremonies; others enjoy loud celebrations. So, pick and choose.

5. Select the Venue

Regarding your wedding theme, you can pick up the right venue for that. Is that a restaurant or is it a castle for a masquerade party for your wedding? Pick and choose.

6. Start Looking for Your Wedding Dress

After deciding on the venue, you should start shopping for your wedding dress. A small wedding ceremony allows thinking less about it, while the pompous ceremony may require you hiring some fashion designer to create your wedding dress.

7. Book a Hotel

If you are planning a big ceremony, you need to book a hotel, so your guests will have a place to stay. If your wedding guests are coming from all over the world, booking a hotel is the best option, as it helps gather them all in one place before the ceremony.

8. Send Invitations

After deciding on the venue and after booking a hotel, you can start sending invitations to your wedding. You should do that beforehand if you want all of those whom you’d like to see at your wedding to be present at the ceremony.

9. Rehearse Your Wedding

When everything is getting closer to the ceremony, and you want your wedding to go perfect, you should rehearse it. That’s how you can make sure that everything is going to go as great as you’ve dreamt about it.

10. Book the Honeymoon

Now, after everything you’ve suffered through, planning your wedding, it is time to think about having a rest afterward. It’s time to book your honeymoon, so even if your wedding doesn't correspond to your dreams, you will stay with your significant other at some paradise on Earth that you are going to pick.

Wedding Planning in 2019: What’s Most Important?

Of course, you may expect to find here the main wedding trends of 2019. While we could have provided you with them, you can look for them elsewhere. The main wedding trend of 2019 is to be mentally prepared for your wedding ceremony and marriage.