‘It’s going to be the best day of my life.’
‘I’ve dreamt of this fairytale since I was a child.’
‘I want everything to be perfect.’
There is a real pressure of wedding day perfection. Instagram and Pinterest are wedding day highlight reels, blogs and magazines give increased visibility of high profile, and often high budget, weddings and the expectations that come from family and friends can make it all seem unbearable.
Let’s set the record straight. The perception of perfect is different for everyone and for us, a perfect wedding is a wedding that ends in a marriage between two people who are wildly in love and have chosen to make the commitment, together.
The amount of money you spend doesn’t matter; your guest list doesn’t matter and those tiny details you stayed up nights thinking about; they don’t matter either.
Embrace imperfectly perfect, because there isn’t such a thing as perfect.
Know that things will pop up on your day that were unplanned, or not accounted for, and that is totally okay. Real weddings are just that, real. They have budgets that are often not infinite, real family drama, real weather and real guests who each have their own personality.
In the lead-up to the wedding take time away from the pressures of social media. Like we said, it’s a highlight reel and often doesn’t expose the things that haven’t gone how the wedding day spreadsheet said it should. Take inspiration, absolutely, but don’t try to replicate.
Keep in mind that styled shoots are styled. A team of creatives have spent a whole heap of time, often in a controlled environment, putting together something that is ‘picture perfect’ and these shoots often aren’t able to be emulated in a real wedding setting.
Remember that other people’s weddings might have had huge budgets, twice or three times bigger than what you were hoping to spend. And sometimes photographs often do not tell the story about a family member who is noticeably not in attendance because of their stance on marriage equality or that there was a tear in a dress as a marrier was getting ready that had to be temporarily pinned together for photos.
Things are bound to go ‘not according to plan,’ and that should be half the fun.
Remove the stress of ‘you only have one wedding day’ and think about why you’re choosing to marry, it’s about marriage and not a wedding. The quality of your marriage doesn’t depend on the party you were able to throw for your loved ones, nor does it lie on the quality of the table napkins.
We’ve said it twice, and we will say it one thousand times over; take time out in wedding planning to readjust your bearings, especially if you lose focus. It’s easy to be consumed in the pressures of perfect when you’re consuming wedding media everywhere you go – trust us, we know. Date your lover, ban wedding talk and remember why you love one another enough to choose the rest of your lives together.
And, when the day rolls around, be in the moment. If things don’t go quite to plan, like a rainstorm rolls over minutes before your outdoor ceremony or their caterer’s car breaks down on their way to the venue, and they are running two hours behind, know that everything will be okay.
The world works in mysterious ways when it comes to things like that. It’ll
all work out. Maybe the clouds will part, and a rainbow will shine over your nuptials. Take a deep breath, hold one another and remember why you’re all gathered – to celebrate your love story.
Let your love celebration be ‘imperfectly perfect’ in every way.
