Stress less

When I got engaged I vowed I would just enjoy it for a while. This I did. For about one week. And that was only because it was Christmas, a time when everything, including the wedding industry, takes a backseat. However, before too long people wanted to know when the big day was. And no matter how vague the date in your mind is, with a date there must come a venue. And with a venue there must come a theme for the day. And so it spirals. At least I enjoyed my one week of being engaged.

As mentioned before, I am quite lazy and I prefer to turn to third parties for guidance/a-person-to-do-it-for-me whenever something big looms on the horizon. So that's just what I did. Big mistake!

There is a LOT of wedding advice out there. For instance, all I wanted to get my hands on was a simple wedding planner - a guide that would tell me what basics I should be getting organised each month during the year before I got married. After dismissing the many planners that suggested a wedding simply could not be arranged in merely 12 months, I was left with a variety of increasingly panic-inducing guides. One told me that I MUST make sure I had booked a session with a feng shui expert at least six months before my wedding day. Another reminded me that I should schedule in time for remodelling a room in my home during the final month of the countdown (weird, but I'm not making it up). In fact, after innocently believing I would not be required to do much during the first three to six months, every guide told me I was wrong, wrong, WRONG. Thank goodness we got engaged at Christmas and I had several bottles of sherry to help calm my battered nerves.

Then there were the blogs and magazines, both of which opened up a completely different can of worms. Not only did I have to plan the biggest event of my life but it also had to be the Best. Day. Ever!!! Yet every wedding was different. Where was the cut-out-and-keep blue print I was after? The one thing I ascertained was that brides can be split into two basic types.

Cookie-cutter

These are the brides who get engaged, buy every wedding magazine on the shelf one day later and will strive for the fairytale wedding. I have nothing but respect for these women as the very idea of setting such a goal sends me racing for the sherry bottle again.

Edgy

Increasingly, there are brides out there who dismiss the fairytale wedding in favour of something different and more "them". At first, this seems like a sensible route, but delve deeper. Take a look at the Polaroid photos, the handcrafted table decorations, the homemade tower of cupcakes. Down this route lies even more stress than the ultimate cookie-cutter wedding.

So, I have decided that from this point forward I will limit the "advice" I seek. I will flick through wedding magazines faster than Superman spins around in his phone booth. I will draw up my own wedding plan.

And if I do want advice, I will ask people to share their tips with me. Friends who have got married and lived to tell the tale, or those who are getting married and are happy to hear me moan if they can do the same. Perhaps the best person to turn to is your mum. Trust me, when you're up to your eyes in dried flowers, weeping as you attempt to tie bouquets in yarn, to place in one of the ten antique glasses you have been collecting, to place in the middle of the circle of tea light holders you have decorated with the names of your guests to use as place settings, you will wonder why you didn't just ask her to host a buffet at her house.