Organization and proper planning can alleviate disasters
I just finished the new bestselling book, Diary of a Mad Bride by Laura Wolf. It chronicles a fictional bride and her wedding planning misadventures. This amusing novel could give a bride plenty of sleepless nights if she followed the narrator’s haphazard wedding-planning techniques. Amy, the fictional bride, is quite content with her boyfriend and single status. In her first few journal entries, it’s evident that she is anti-marriage. She laughs and scorns at her girlfriends’ obsessions with marriage and weddings.
Her attitude changes, though, when her boyfriend pops the question. One minute Amy pretends indifference to marriage and wedding hoopla, and the next minute she is excited, confused and overwhelmed with wedding planning details.
Right after her engagement, Amy purchases a thick wedding planner. She compares her quick list of 20 Things to Do to the wedding planner’s list of 70 Things to Do. She breaks out in a sweat and makes some hasty additions to her list.
Amy is much too cool and hip to appear overly enthusiastic about being a bride. She wants a classy, understated wedding that she can control. She doesn’t want a c ircus so she scorns her friends’ attempts to help out and refuses to solicit her mother’s advice.
Amy’s expectations for a classy wedding, complete with lobster risotto, are thwarted by her small wedding budget. Her choice reception venues are too pricey for her budget. Like many of us, she has champagne taste with a soda pop budget.
The frenzied bride shops nonstop for the perfect wedding dress. She tries on hundreds of gowns. According to her, she’s cute and has a great body, so what is her problem?
Her standards are far too high and unrealistic for her small budget. Once again, she has designer taste and carries a discount pocketbook. Can you believe this level of fussiness from a girl who pretends indifference?
Relationship issues also play a part in the bride’s meltdown. Divorced future in-laws, indifferent parents, and an over-worked fianc’, contribute to her enormous stress level.
When she finally decides she wants parental input (financial only, please), they are thrifty, distant and distracted by their own problems.
Amy spends an extraordinary amount of time saying what she doesn’t want her wedding to be and less time actually planning it. Essential details are ignored because they don’t seem important to her at the time, though she does spend an enormous amount of time and energy obsessing about her wedding shoes.
Curiously, she wants control but is too busy with her career, and shoe shopping, to handle the details. Much to her chagrin, the issues that she ignores and shoves under the carpet continue to resurface until they are solved by default.
What are the lessons learned from Amy’s misadventure? Details need to be handled in wedding planning and some things can’t be laughed or ignored. Organization and proper planning can alleviate disasters and give the bride and her family peace of mind.
Wedding planners are an indispensable tool and should be used in planning a wedding of any size. Planners will remind the bride, month by month and week by week, what needs to be accomplished in an appropriate timeframe.
If the bride is organized, she will not be caught off guard by surprising details. The details will reveal themselves as the planning process proceeds.
K. Joy Schaeffer is a bridal consultant. You can e-mail her your bridal questions at bridejoy@yahoo.com.