Why is the wedding already freaking me out?
I mean, it's not like we're strapped for time. We're looking at late summer/early fall of next year. It's not like we're strapped for cash. Yeah, it'll be expensive, but I don't have $10,000 wedding tastes and we have two incomes and my parents might cover some of it. It's not like we have other shit going on that might make planning more stressful--our health is good, our relationships with our families are fine, our relationship itself is good.
But it seems like every. single. thing that I have to do, or think about, or choice I have to make about this wedding is fraught with the kind of emotional handwringing you should only find on a Tuesday afternoon on A&E. Never a confident decision-maker at the best of times, I feel overrun by the conviction that whatever I do is going to be hugely stressful, unfulfilling, and poorly executed. I'm having a huge crisis of confidence, seemingly out of nowhere, and it's freaking me out. Obviously, the fact that I've never planned a wedding before and I don't have any friends in town who have been married recently enough to make recommendations to me about vendors etc. makes the research and such more difficult, but I'm also nervous enough about all of this that I'm starting to question where all the fear is actually coming from.
So I went home last night, after a workday spent trying to work and mostly freaking out about engagement party plans (because reserving a city park, inviting some friends for burgers, and making sure our families could make it on the same day is a task fraught with emotional landmines and psychological bear traps, right? RIGHT?) and lay down to cuddle with my fiance. I was telling him some of the things I was feeling and thinking about, and out of my mouth came the following gem: "I guess I have this assumption in my head that because I'm excited we're getting married, everything about wedding planning should be fun and exciting too, so if I'm upset or stressed out about something, it must be because I have some underlying doubts about our relationship or getting married in the first place."
Oh.
So the real-world drama of having to find the right venue, changing the date six times trying to accommodate everyone and still not being able to, his parents' seeming disinterest in the entire thing and insistence that they couldn't possibly travel out to see us, even though we left every weekend between June 1 and August 31 open for them to pick a date that worked for them, and underneath it all the awareness that this is just an engagement party and if scheduling it is this hard, won't scheduling a wedding be fifty times harder? gives you a recipe for stress. Makes perfect sense. But stress does not equal doubt. And, of course, I didn't realize that until I said it out loud to Nate and realized how stupid it sounded.
The fact of the matter is, yeah, the idea of getting married still scares me. The lifelong commitment to Nate, the growing older and having kids and making big decisions together, no. Entering into the Institution of Marriage is a pretty big fucking deal, and it still freaks me out a little bit, but really, that doesn't mean I have doubts about the relationship itself, it means I'm about to go through a rite of passage that, understandably, carries some weighty emotional stuff along with it.
So it's okay that it's not all fun. It doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to getting married, despite what my neuroses might worry about. It doesn't mean I'm a bad fiancee, or that I'm going to be a bad wife. It just means that being in charge of all this planning is stressful as hell, and leaves lots of room for my already-nervous brain to go haywire. I just have to keep my eye on the big picture, rather than worrying too much about whether we'll have an optional party at a park, beach, or bowling alley, and carry on.
I mean, it's not like we're strapped for time. We're looking at late summer/early fall of next year. It's not like we're strapped for cash. Yeah, it'll be expensive, but I don't have $10,000 wedding tastes and we have two incomes and my parents might cover some of it. It's not like we have other shit going on that might make planning more stressful--our health is good, our relationships with our families are fine, our relationship itself is good.
But it seems like every. single. thing that I have to do, or think about, or choice I have to make about this wedding is fraught with the kind of emotional handwringing you should only find on a Tuesday afternoon on A&E. Never a confident decision-maker at the best of times, I feel overrun by the conviction that whatever I do is going to be hugely stressful, unfulfilling, and poorly executed. I'm having a huge crisis of confidence, seemingly out of nowhere, and it's freaking me out. Obviously, the fact that I've never planned a wedding before and I don't have any friends in town who have been married recently enough to make recommendations to me about vendors etc. makes the research and such more difficult, but I'm also nervous enough about all of this that I'm starting to question where all the fear is actually coming from.
So I went home last night, after a workday spent trying to work and mostly freaking out about engagement party plans (because reserving a city park, inviting some friends for burgers, and making sure our families could make it on the same day is a task fraught with emotional landmines and psychological bear traps, right? RIGHT?) and lay down to cuddle with my fiance. I was telling him some of the things I was feeling and thinking about, and out of my mouth came the following gem: "I guess I have this assumption in my head that because I'm excited we're getting married, everything about wedding planning should be fun and exciting too, so if I'm upset or stressed out about something, it must be because I have some underlying doubts about our relationship or getting married in the first place."
Oh.
So the real-world drama of having to find the right venue, changing the date six times trying to accommodate everyone and still not being able to, his parents' seeming disinterest in the entire thing and insistence that they couldn't possibly travel out to see us, even though we left every weekend between June 1 and August 31 open for them to pick a date that worked for them, and underneath it all the awareness that this is just an engagement party and if scheduling it is this hard, won't scheduling a wedding be fifty times harder? gives you a recipe for stress. Makes perfect sense. But stress does not equal doubt. And, of course, I didn't realize that until I said it out loud to Nate and realized how stupid it sounded.
The fact of the matter is, yeah, the idea of getting married still scares me. The lifelong commitment to Nate, the growing older and having kids and making big decisions together, no. Entering into the Institution of Marriage is a pretty big fucking deal, and it still freaks me out a little bit, but really, that doesn't mean I have doubts about the relationship itself, it means I'm about to go through a rite of passage that, understandably, carries some weighty emotional stuff along with it.
So it's okay that it's not all fun. It doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to getting married, despite what my neuroses might worry about. It doesn't mean I'm a bad fiancee, or that I'm going to be a bad wife. It just means that being in charge of all this planning is stressful as hell, and leaves lots of room for my already-nervous brain to go haywire. I just have to keep my eye on the big picture, rather than worrying too much about whether we'll have an optional party at a park, beach, or bowling alley, and carry on.
Yes. To all of it. Wedding planning is stressful, and the "institution" can be scary, but as I liked to remind myself in the middle of my own planning stress: at the end of the day, you and your beau are making your life together. And that's enough.
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