Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.Raise Your Hand if You Hate Wedding Planning
I thought planning a wedding would be the best time of my life. The celebration, the details, the crafting; I live for this stuff. And yet, I’ve spent the later part of our engagement resenting our wedding.
First of all, let me say this: I don’t feel anything but joy for our marriage. I love Rooster, and committing to spending every day with him is the most natural and exuberant thing in the world to me. But when it comes to The Wedding, I’ve been feeling a bit lost. When we were first engaged 17 months ago, I anticipated spending a modest amount on a very practical party. For me, it would be all about the marriage. But somewhere along the way, I got caught up in weddings. I spent most of the time battling between what I could do and what I wanted to do, and I’ll admit that I lost sight of our practical goals. Or maybe I just recognized that the pomp meant more to me than I’d imagined in the first place.
Our small wedding turned into a big drain on our time, our thoughts and our wallets. And if I’m being totally honest, I began to resent it. I’ve heard newlywed brides say that after their own hectic days were done and behind them, they wished they’d just eloped, and I certainly expected to feel the same way. I never expected, however, to feel that way before the wedding was even here.
So instead of post-wedding depression, I fell into a pre-wedding depression. For the past few months, I put off tasks and projects related to our big day. I just tried to live day-to-day, worrying about work and “real life” and not this expensive and intricate party that I’d grown to resent. I keep using the word “resent,” because I can’t find the right words to describe the way I felt about our wedding during those months. I was still excited for our day, after all. Excited to spend time with our family and affirm our love for each other in front of the people we care about. But in planning our day, I got away from all that and began to worry too much about making it perfect, and started to hate how much time and money we were pouring into our perfect day. So I stopped caring about wedding planning for a while. I was still checking things off the list despite my melancholy, mostly because we’d signed enough contracts and checks to ensure we couldn’t just hit the rewind button on the big bash. But while I did it all, I just felt… detached.
But something happened yesterday, with less than one week to go until our wedding: I got really, really excited. And proud. And now I’m ready to share the things I’ve been working on in silence with you, Hive. There’s plenty that has been done and decided since I left you, and there’s still more to go in these last five days. (As a critical procrastinator, I’ve put off a lot of projects. Classic Miss Hen.) I’ll get through as much as I can here in the home stretch, then after the wedding, I’ll continue sharing all the things we’ve been working on for our wedding day.
I’m sorry for being a bad blogger and going missing in action for the past month, but I hope you understand why. When you’re trying to repress the stress of planning a wedding, getting online and waxing about it is the furthest thing from your mind. By writing this, I hope I’ve earned your forgiveness. And I hope that I might help somebody else out there feeling the same things. Planning a wedding might not be all it’s cracked up to be for you, and that’s totally OK.
So I hope you’ll have me back, Hive! This wedding is shaping up to be amazing, after all, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
