“It’s like the woman has to be in the dark until the burden of the work comes along.” “I hate this whole idea that everything has to be a surprise,” a friend recently told me. We were talking about proposals, specifically hers. It hadn’t been a surprise; she and her then-boyfriend had discussed getting engaged. […]
If you’re a woman, you’ve been sold on weddings since the day you were born. A year after they got married, a client of mine asked her husband what had been the most surprising thing about planning their wedding. “How much work it took,” he replied. “How did you not know?!” she said. The amount of work […]
In any other realm of our lives, we would actively oppose such blatant sexism. But weddings get away with it because, well, they’re weddings. A client once told me that no matter what she and her fiancé did, her wedding vendors only talked to her. Even if the emails came directly from him, the responses […]
Over the last five decades, the percentage of couples who live together before marriage has increased by nearly 900 percent. If we think of a wedding as a coming-of-age ceremony, it merits the kind of pomp and circumstance that’s currently the norm. But a wedding isn’t a coming-of-age ceremony — at least for the vast majority of […]
Give her permission to not care. Tell her: “It’s OK your wedding isn’t the center of your whole life. It shouldn’t be. That would be unhealthy.” My work as a day-of wedding coordinator kicks in about a month before the wedding. While I check in with my clients every month, the “dot your i’s and cross […]
When it’s all said and done, you’re not really going to care who walked down the aisle or who gave a speech or who wore what. You’re going to care about how you felt. Despite the headaches they cause, there’s a lot to love about weddings. How often do we get to celebrate someone we […]
The cold hard truth? You’ll still pay too much for things. As a day-of wedding coordinator, I’ve learned a few things about weddings. Keep the buffet line moving. Provide plenty of parking. People have no idea how much weddings cost. It’s not their fault. There are few reliable sources of information about this kind of […]
It’s an outdated concept that does more harm than good. Wedding registries are one of the most obvious examples of how the weddings we have don’t reflect the times we live in. Originally, a registry was a way for a couple to establish a household. They needed to do this because, typically, neither party had […]
