When Not to Get Married

- When you're moving within a year of the wedding, especially if you're moving more than once.
- When you plan on getting a new job or otherwise drastically changing your day-to-day life within 8 months of the wedding, especially if you actually care about said job.
- When you plan on making a career change around the time of the wedding (after is OK).
- When you plan on going through a traumatic or otherwise life changing event within 8 months of the wedding, like major surgery.
- When you have major life commitments like school or a demanding job.
- When your fiance has to do any of these things.
- When you live far away from your wedding location and cannot visit often, especially if you plan on DIYing lots of things.
- When you don't know where you're going to live when you get married.
- When you plan on DIYing lots of projects but do not have much time or much help.
- When you're not ready to get married.
- When you live far away from ALL of your friends and family.
- When you don't have any money.

Obviously, a lot of us do some of these things.  In fact, some of us do many of these things.  And sometimes you just have to plan your wedding around your life.  Nonetheless, all of these factors make planning a wedding much more difficult and stressful, and as I am dealing with (or have dealt with) pretty much all of them, I am starting to get really worried about how far behind we are.  Bridesmaid dresses in particular are becoming disconcerting.  I need help.  So today, Daniel and I went through the list I made a while back of EVERYTHING we need to do before, during, and after the wedding and split it up.  Hopefully, assigning responsibility for everything to each of us will not only take a lot of the planning off my shoulders but will also make it so that I do not have to make sure everything gets done myself.  With the attention I have to give to my new job and the insane scheduling changes I'm going to have to put up with for a while, I'm going to need help.

So newly engaged peoples, learn from my troubles.  Trying to get married while both of you are trying to establish careers and you have to move or travel a lot is a major pain in the ass.

What did I miss?  What obstacles did your lives present while you were planning your wedding?

How to Have a Successful and Productive Wedding Planning Weekend

Step 1:  Don't do nearly enough research before heading to your wedding destination.  Be sure to have a good reason like a personal crisis and failed ceremony plans right before too.

Step 2:  Make it so that you only have 2 full days at the destination that is over 400 miles away from where you live.  While you're too poor to come back up for several months and everything you're doing must be decided by the end of this trip.

Step 3:  Get sick the day before driving to your semi-destination wedding.  Get a lot worse the day that you leave.

Step 4:  Make yourself sicker by stuffing so much food down your throat that you literally cannot stand another bite.  Then try to look at outdoor ceremony locations in the dark and the cold.

Step 5:  Get a lot sicker your first night there.  Go to bed late and wake up before dawn without being able to get back to sleep.  Remember that you only have 2 days to do everything and try to power through the pain.

Step 6:  Be too out of it to think to check whether the florists you're visiting are open on Sundays.  Waste 2 hours driving to closed florists.  Feel like an idiot.

Step 7:  Wake up with a fever on your second and last full day.  Decide to press on anyway despite inability to stand for more than a few minutes.

Step 8:  Look for outdoor ceremony on a cold, windy day near the ocean.

Step 9:  Leave early the last day to get home to your brother's birthday party.  Make sure your fiance was up all night with you so that he is too tired to drive and ends up sleeping while you drive.  Try not to crash.



How Not to Kill Yourself through Your Own Stupidity

Step 1:  Make your fiance do most (and then all) of the driving.

Step 2:  Have your amazingly scrumptious food tasting before you realize you are dying.

Step 3:  Eat cake so delectable that you can still taste how good it is even when you cannot smell.

Step 4:  Reject your OCD nature and let your fiance check out hotels on his own.

Step 5:  Ditch everything that doesn't need to be done now.

Step 6:  Sleep in the car between ceremony locations.

Step 7:  Watch everything your hosts have saved on their DVR.


Though I hope this doesn't happen to you, as Jillreigh reminded me recently, shit happens.  People get sick.  Things do not go as planned.  Life is not perfect.  Sometimes, you just have to deal with it.  We really needed to get our ceremony and hotels taken care of, but the flowers can wait.  And I had to suppress my god-forsaken nature and not do everything myself.  This was probably good practice for the day of when I will not get to set up the wedding decorations and will have to leave it others...and not freak out if it's not perfect.

A word to the wise...

...never do any sort of wedding planning/discussion on 3 hours of sleep.  It does not end well.  That is my tip for the day.