wedding decorations

Plan Your Wedding Your Way

We’ve seen it all too often when a bride and groom become overwrought and stressed by the magnitude of the task of planning their wedding. Sometimes it’s the persistent opinions of family members that affect their decisions, for others it’s a desire to please everyone and leaving their own wishes by the wayside in doing so. Add in time and budget constraints, logistics and responsibilities, and you’ve got a recipe for a nervous breakdown.

As a result, we thought we’d put together a mini manifesto of considerations to help reassure any overwhelmed engaged couples out there that it’s perfectly alright to strive for the wedding of your dreams – not anyone else’s.

Character

A wedding is about the two people saying the vows and this should be reflected throughout the day. Sometimes this fact can get lost in translation, so as a starting point for your plans and as a mantra to get you through the process:

  1. Where do you want to get married?
  2. When do you want to to get married?
  3. Who would be most missed if they couldn’t come to your wedding?
  4. What do you want your wedding to be about? Fun? Glamour? Family? Partying? Romance
  5. How do you want people to remember your wedding?

Don’t be afraid to include things that you love and which will make you smile in years to come when you look back at your wedding. Your wedding should be a testament to your relationship, not an exercise in manners and etiquette.

wedding dresses

Tradition

  1. You don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Tradition is just a way of giving you a set of guidelines; you get to pick and choose which ones are relevant to you.
  2. You can have an outdoor ceremony, a first look photo shoot or speeches before dinner if you want to. Churches, formal family photos and speeches after the wedding breakfast are not mandatory!
  3. Don’t be influenced by relatives who want to tell you about what their generation did. It’s irrelevant if it’s not what you want to do. It’s irrelevant whether your cousin did it.
  4. When it comes to food, you need to make sure no one goes hungry but don’t feel that a formal wedding breakfast is your only option: food stalls, afternoon tea, bowl food and dessert stations are all fun ways of breaking up the day.

wedding cakes

Trends

  1. You don’t have to do whatever is popular or prevalent in wedding magazines and blogs.
  2. Weddings should be an expression of personality, not a fashion statement.
  3. Feel free to take elements of things you like without feeling like you have to do a job lot. Quite keen on Pantone’s colour of the year? Great, put an accent of it in the typography of your stationery rather than dressing your tables in radiant orchid coloured tablecloths.
  4. Celebrities don’t necessarily have good taste, so don’t use their nuptials as a blueprint. We all cringe a little when we look back at Posh & Becks on their thrones!

The main thing to remember if things do become a bit too much and you feel your plans are conflicting is that you just need to take a step back, take a deep breath and try to imagine how you will feel about a decision in a year, 5 years or 10 years from now. If you’re going to be disappointed that you gave up your preference or acquiesced to someone else, then don’t do it. Even the staunchest adversaries will forget that you didn’t use the wording they advocated on your invitation once they’re actually at your wedding, enjoying themselves and celebrating your love.

Photo credits: pinterest, Snapdragon Parties