Blogs Dating Emily 

Wedding planning can kill you, but only if you let it

Emily Campbell

Words cannot express how much planning a wedding can take over your entire life. Oh wait, words can express it, and here are the words: WEDDING PLANNING TAKES OVER YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.

I didn’t even get a chance to write a blog last week because all of my free time was consumed by planning this one-time event. Literally when my deadline came around, I had written about two coherent lines and then the rest of it was jibberish or words that don’t make sense, like “wedazy” (meant to be interpreted as “wedding crazy”, as in, “flower arrangements make me wedazy”). So I apologize to any readers who were looking for my blog this week, but I was buried under a mound of taffeta, sample invitations, and general anxiety.

Somehow, like a dumbass, I assumed that because I like to make lists and host parties that planning a wedding would be just as much fun, if only just a bigger event. I cannot tell you how wrong that assumption was. Not only was it wrong, but everything about planning a wedding seems to snowball into one big, messy ball of tulle and flowers and programs.

Let me just paint you a picture.  I called a caterer that a friend of my mom’s recommended, and asked them how much it would be for a picnic menu for 100 people and they quoted me $68 a head. That’s $6,800 for 100 people to eat hot dogs, hamburgers and fried chicken. Half of whom I DON’T EVEN KNOW. Yeah, no thanks.

Since we are pretty casual people anyway, my fiancé and I decided that picnic food is basically like a barbeque, and started looking into barbeque places, which would basically guarantee good food, because who doesn’t like BBQ? Then I started thinking about it, and the BBQ places, while cheaper than a “real” caterer, don’t provide all the things that a regular caterer would provide, like real plates and silverware and glasses, so we would have to rent those things too, because I don’t want everyone eating off of plastic tableware at our wedding, and then we would need to hire someone to clean everything up because the BBQ place would just put everything in the trash but we wouldn’t do that with real dishes obviously.

Then once I started thinking about dishes I started thinking, well since the BBQ places don’t provide alcohol, we need to figure that out too. So I read up on it and turns out we can just buy our own alcohol and save tons of money. But then I thought, we’ll need to hire a bartender, and we also need to rent glasses for the wine and the mixed drinks, which is, again, more money.

Plus we need to keep the beer cold so we need to buy tons of ice, and get some of those barrel things to hold all the beers, and we need more linens to cover them so we don’t look like hillbillies, and then I thought “OMG LINENS” and then I had to think about the expense of renting tablecloths, plus the tables that they have at the reception place seat six people, but really only four people comfortably because they are small tables, and the place is small so how are we going to seat 100 people and still have room to dance?

Then the rental coordinator emailed me and mentioned that while their staff will clean up the chairs and tables and vacuum and take out the trash after the wedding, we are responsible for getting all the decorations down, and it has to be that night, because they have church services on Sunday, so I will need to hire some people to do that, because you know the entire bridal party and our family will be drunk at the end of the night and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be pulling down lights and fabric and hangy balls on the night of my wedding…

Which is when I realized wedding planning can easily take over your life and steal away all your happiness at even being engaged in the first place until you are just a shell of the girl you once were – that is, if you let it. I refuse to let my soul be sucked away by wedding planning.

So I took a deep breath, called my mother, let it all out, and then started again, with a much smaller goal of only thinking about one thing at a time until everything is done. And that’s how I’m going to try to do it from now on so that on my wedding day I am not Soul-Sucked-Out-Crazy-Bridezilla-Shell-Emily.