The Joys of Planning: It's Okay to Think it Sucks

Before I dive into our recaps, I have a confession to make. I already explained how emotional I was leading up to the wedding and I told you that I didn't fall into the now common post-wedding depression when the big day was over. The reason is this: wedding planning was not fun for me. Before you're all "Gasp! Shock! Horror!" let me explain.

One of the things I've noticed about many wedding blogs is that brides tend to gloss over the negative and focus on the positives. It's a great quality in real life - I mean who wants to be negative all the time? - but it's not exactly the whole truth. Before I started really planning my wedding, I was a wedding junkie. Guys, I had a 100+ page Powerpoint presentation (pre-Pinterest) and my post-Pinterest life was filled with wedding blogs and pins. It was "OMG! Exciting!" and I was so ready to start planning my big fat awesome wedding that I was sure would be filled with rainbows and puppies and ice cream just like in the magical Pinterest world I'd been living in.

Fast forward to getting engaged to Mr. Rucksack and I learned that real life is a lot less fun than the blogs let on. DIY awesomeness takes serious time, everything costs about a million dollars, and against all of your best intentions you will one day look up and realize that you have just spent 5 hours of your life agonizing over something trivial like cake stand heights or the existence of 300 shades of ivory. Your family will fight you over all your decisions, big and small. Your friends will fail to send in their RSVPs. And every time someone asks you about the wedding you will have to fight the urge to shout "Please stop asking me about the wedding!" and will instead go on to pretend to be really excited about how your "vision is really coming to life."

I'm not speaking for everyone here, because I am sure there are plenty of brides who really did love planning their wedding. To them I say: "Tell me your secret!" To everyone else, I want you to know: It's okay to not like planning your wedding. It's even okay to hate it. And hating wedding planning does not mean that you won't have an amazing wedding day and an amazing marriage.

I felt so much pressure to not only plan the perfect wedding, but to plan it with a big smile on my face. (All while working two jobs and baking cookies and serving lemonade or some shiz like that.) After a couple of months of playing along, I eventually gave up and started telling my friends the truth."Oh how's the planning going? It sucks, actually. I can't wait for this day to be over so I can be married and go on my honeymoon and put it all behind me." Luckily, most of my married friends could completely relate and the unmarried ones were fascinated by my tales of "and then we got into a screaming match over truffled macaroni bites." 

Admitting that not every part of wedding planning was fun helped me realize which projects I wanted to continue and which I could say "F this S" about. Unfortunately, some of the really sucky matters couldn't be avoided - like RSVPs and motherly advice. In those cases I turned to copious amounts of wine and powered through.

Did my wedding turn out exactly the way past-tense wedding obsessed Miss Rucksack would have wanted? Nope, not at all. That girl would be pissed that I put OOT Bags in the "Eff-it" pile. But it was the exact wedding that preserved my sanity and kept me from having a nervous break-down. And our wedding day was truly amazing.

Rucksack Guest Photo

How did you really feel about wedding planning?