Wedding Planning with your Fiance

Priority Setting and Teamwork

When it's just the two of you, dating, life can be grand. It is truly the most self absorbed period of your relationship when there are no more worries than what movie to see or where to eat dinner. You can talk for hours about everything under the sun and you can fantasize about your future life together.

And then you get engaged. After the "hour of bliss" of being newly engaged, reality gives most of us a big smackdown.

Without realizing it, the ring symbolizes the beginning your public relationship. Your relationship is no longer about just the two of you. When you get engaged, you are becoming a son or daughter in law, a brother or sister in law, and you are joining a new family. Imagine being adopted at age 25 or 30 and this is what it's like to get married. You are entering into a new emotional forcefield, a new family you did not grow up with and do not share a history with. Even if you've known your fiance(e) for years, there is nothing quite like "til death do us part" to change the way others will relate to you or to change how you view or relate to others. All the sudden your boyfriends mom is going to become your mother-in-law. If you want children, you will be making her into a grandmother and she will be your childrens grandmother, no matter how much you love or hate her.

Our book, Take Back Your Wedding, goes into great detail on working as a couple towards the big wedding day. There are excersizes designed to help get the conversation going and to avoid common pitfalls in wedding planning. We are very groom friendly, believing men have an important role in the wedding even if they chose not to be an active co-planner. Below is part of chapter three of our book, which assumes you are still at the beginning stages of wedding planning. We find brides and grooms love our advice even if their wedding is over because it gives them perspective on what went wrong. So hopefully even if you're far into wedding planning the information below will give you some "a-ha" moments as to why things may or may not be working well between you and your fiance.

In this chapter we will help you get your act together before you go too far down the path with your family and friends. The first big question is so obvious that many couples skip it. It’s not about location, cost, or preachers. The first big question is what kind of team you want to be as a couple in planning your wedding. How do you want to do this together? A number of ways can work as long as you are clear with each other. Here are three kinds of partnerships we have observed, arranged from more traditional to less traditional:

The bride is in charge. The bride is the planner and decision maker. She keeps the groom informed and may assign him certain tasks.

Leader/Supporter. The bride is the clear leader but the groom helps make decisions and may have his own areas of responsibility, such as dealing with his parents and the men in the wedding party.

Co-Leaders: They make all major decisions together. They often divide responsibility for gathering information prior to making joint decisions, and they may also have some separate areas of responsibility.

Given that our own wedding planning experiences were closer to the “co-leaders” than the other two, we have a bias towards this kind of partnership. But as we said, any of these approaches can work as long as both people are clear and feel okay with the arrangement. Each also has its disadvantages. The co-leaders may argue more because they have to negotiate more decisions. The leader and supporter can run into problems when he feels trumped on a decision he cares a lot about, and when she feels he is not following through on his responsibilities. The fully in charge bride can feel overwhelmed by the responsibility and resentful about carrying the total load, and the groom may feel like an outsider during the planning of his own wedding.

Regardless of how you decide to divide your roles, we hold two firm convictions: both of you should express your dreams and ideals for your wedding, and each of you should take primary responsibility for dealing with your own family. Later in the book we will return to the family matters. For now we focus on how to talk openly and constructively about what you each want for your wedding.

WHAT IS YOUR IDEAL WEDDING?

Although there are hundreds of decisions in planning a wedding, there is a shorter list of key ones that reflect your cherished hopes for your wedding. We have developed a worksheet (Table 3.1) to help you clarify your expectations for six key areas of your wedding: location, size, season, ceremony, wedding party, and who will pay. All of these decisions affect one another, and there will be challenges in implementing them as a package. Being clear on what you prefer, what you feel you must have, and where you can bend, will help you avoid future conflict.

There is lots of advice available to you about the timing and logistics for deciding these matters. Our interest is on how you can surface your hopes and ideals, so that you can understand each other better and be a good working team as you begin your discussions with your families and other stakeholders in you wedding. Fill out the worksheet separately and then plan a time to discuss it after you had read the rest of this chapter, which will prepare you for the challenges you may face in the conversation.

HOW BIG, HOW SMALL TO HAVE THE WEDDING?

The size of the wedding is one of the main stumbling blocks for couples and families. The choice of who to include and exclude is fraught with both emotional and financial implications. It involves you as a couple and also your families and friends.

Size involves not only the big picture of what you envision as you look out over the room where you wedding is held and as you greet your guests in a receiving line or afterwards at the reception. It’s also about including and excluding specific people and categories of people—that’s why it’s hard. And those inclusions and exclusions involve the feelings and wishes of parents or grandparents who expect to have a say. Everyone has very different notions of what is acceptable. Some brides want as many people as possible, even if they have never met a lot of people in attendance. Others cry at the thought of looking out at the pews filled with people they don’t recognize. Some grooms assume that their buddies from elementary school will of course be invited, while others envision a small family wedding.

For some parents, a wedding is a time to invite everyone in their entire circle of acquaintances—such as the boss who invites a hundred employees, most of whom don’t know his daughter or son. What if the other family has only a small circle of acquaintances? Or does not want to invite co-workers? All of this is complicated by the question of who is paying for which aspects of the wedding, and by whether either of you, or your families, believes in a fifty-fifty split of the guest list. Then add in divorced parents on one or both sides, each with new spouses who have friends and relatives they might want to include. It’s no wonder that wedding planning often hits the rocks early on the decision of how big the guest list should be, and which kinds of people should be included and excluded.

Another tricky decision related to the wedding size is the wedding party. While some people find it very simple to pick out wedding party attendants, others struggle with all the relationships, past-behaviors of drunken attendants, family, stepsiblings, and friends. Add location to the mix—whose hometown is the wedding in? --and it can be very stressful. It’s important to figure out what role you want your attendants to play; for example, if the groom has 3 sisters that expect to be in the wedding party but live 2000 miles away, while the bride expects local attendants to help with dress shopping and wedding planning, these issues can be worked out if you think through it well and find ways to avoid conflict (particularly in the family since you’ll be seeing your sister-in-laws the rest of your life!)

PITFALLS TO AVOID IN WEDDING PLANNING

Let’s face it: if you are a traditionally raised woman and man, the bride will have a fuller picture of her ideal wedding. If you are the bride, there is a better than even chance you have been thinking about this off and on since age six. You probably have been paying careful attention to the weddings you have attended as an adult. Too big, too small, too formal, too casual, too ostentatious, too simple, right mood, wrong mood, perfect music, distracting music—and so forth. For the groom, chances are that you did not start to pay attention to weddings until your friends began to marry, and that you do not have as many clearly formed ideals and preferences as your fiancée does. Guys generally don’t ask other guys if they thought the reception centerpieces were tacky.

All of this can work to your advantage if you play it right—men can come fresher to the discussion and women can come with a longer history of observation—but your differences can also keep you from having a balanced conversation about some very important matters. Even if as a bride you are going to make most of the decisions about the wedding, you will feel better about the decisions if you know what your future husband hopes for from his wedding. If both of you are going to work closely together on the wedding, it’s obviously important to get your expectations on the table early in the process.

In an unfortunately common example of misfiring, Nora told her fiancé Greg that she had always dreamed of a small, intimate wedding in the tiny chapel on the campus where they had both attended college. At the time, he could not think of a reason for her not to have her dream, so he agreed. Only after the chapel was booked did Greg tell Nora that he had “kind of hoped” to have his whole extended family come to the wedding. His clan alone would more than fill the chapel. She flipped, and brouhaha ensued between the couple and both of their families. Greg had not been acting on bad faith; he had not made the connection between the first decision on the lovely location and the later decision on the size of the guest list. And Nora and Greg together had made the mistake of not putting all of their expectations on the table at the same time. Each part of the wedding planning affects the other, and each member of the couple may feel strongly about different decisions.