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The Wedding Planner: A Few Things I Had to Keep Telling Myself

Here are a few things I had to keep telling myself as I scrambled to pull together the final pieces of the nuptial fête Ted and I threw last weekend:


  1. Everything that really needs to get done will get done. Throughout the wedding planning process, I had two to-do lists—one on a piece of paper, the other one playing on a constant loop in my head. The incessant repetition of the latter often made me feel like I had an infinite number of chores to complete in a few days. Whenever I felt myself tumbling into the abyss, I returned to the finite, rock-solid reality of the paper list and starting crossing off little, detail-oriented tasks that really were not essential. Then I would tell myself, in a calm, interior voice, that all the really necessary tasks would get done, simply because they must. In the end, everything important did, in fact, get done, and I even found time to get my eyebrows waxed.

  2. Friends and family are eager to help. I did much of the wedding planning and preparation by myself, and sometimes I felt a little overwhelmed. Again and again, I was soothed by the revelation that my friends and family would be happy to do anything I asked them to do. My parents and my sister did a whole lot of work, but I also had a fleet of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and chums ready to pitch in as soon as I called them. I felt very lucky, and deeply grateful.

  3. At least a few things will go wrong, and it won’t really matter. I really never expected the big day to be perfect. I wasn’t even striving for perfection. I did take considerable effort to make everything as nice as it could be, but I also prepared myself to accept the inevitable vicissitudes with good cheer. In the end, not much went wrong. It rained during the picnic, so my vision of everyone lounging on blankets in the sun was not to be, but we had a shelter. It turns out that the hotel where I made arrangements for out-of-town guests to stay was not exactly four-star; at first, I was horrified to discover this—truly, I turned cold with panic—but my friends are a plucky bunch, and the unhappy accommodations didn’t seem to impinge on their ability to have a swell time. These were really the only major shortcomings in an otherwise excellent event, and, in the final analysis, they didn’t matter that much.

  4. It’s all about people, not decorations, food, weather, etc. Often, when I felt myself losing it over some tiny detail, I would pause to remember that the details were just that—details. Ted and I were throwing a party so that we could celebrate our marriage and embark on our new life together with everyone we loved around us, and that’s what we did. It was awesome to be able to bring old friends together again, and to introduce people from different places and times in our lives to each other. Even though I’m glad we were able to include the little touches that make an event charming, it would have been a special occasion even without them.

  5. Everyone is going to have a great time. This was my wedding-planning mantra, really, the fundamental truth to which I clung as I potted herbs for centerpieces and searched for cornichons and got a little lost on the way to my bachelorette party. Even if a few things didn’t turn out quite the way I had dreamed of them, it just wouldn’t matter, I assured myself: Everyone would still have fun. As far as I could tell, everyone did. I know I did, and Ted did, too.


July 19, 2004 | Permalink

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