Preparing for Your Wedding

While of course you are over-the-moon excited to spend the rest of your life with the love of your life, the planning of a wedding comes with all types of anticipated stress.

Whether it’s keeping a budget, listening to strongly opinionated family members or just looking at the sheer number of details a wedding requires each couple to plan for, wedding planning can easily become more of a stressor than a memorable time in life.

Here are four ways to keep yourself as blissful as possible throughout the wedding planning process.

Regardless of the topic at hand, expectations are often the source of conflict between people and wedding planning is no different. After your engagement allow yourselves time to bask in the pure joy and excitement of the time before jumping into the actual planning.

But when it is time to plan, first sit down with just your partner and come up with a list of each of your expectations for the wedding planning process. One way to open up conversation is to each take time to write down your top three expectations or ideally non-negotiables of the wedding.

Then work from these six items to ensure you each are getting what you most hope for out of the wedding. All other things are negotiable and allow you to work towards compromise. Here are additional questions you can ask yourself and your partner as you plan your big day.

Depending on the situation, you may be contending with tough conversations around a wedding budget and the influence of family members during the process.

Making sure you both are clear on the budget, who will be helping fund the wedding and what the expectations of those who contribute money are to decision-making is important. Since you have a lifetime to manage money jointly, it is a great way to start practicing if you have not already.

Also, if you have parent(s) who are contributing to the wedding financially, sit down with them as a couple and ask about their expectations. Depending on what comes from the conversation you may need to make further decisions about money and plans.

Research shows practicing gratitude and mindfulness daily can greatly improve one’s overall emotional and mental health. Because wedding planning is stressful, committing to these two practices can help the entire process be more manageable emotionally and allow for both of you to enjoy the process as much as possible.

Writing down three things you are grateful or appreciative of each day is enough to totally shift your mindset and remind you of the true meaning of marriage which is very different than the wedding planning process.

Mindfulness and relaxation are taking time to center yourself in the present and find the calm and quiet in each day. This is not easy to do with all of the demands on you during such a busy time but doing so will pay dividends when it comes to your physical, emotional and mental health.

Another helpful tool for calming and meditation is the use of essential oils like Young Living Essential Oils which can be applied or diffused throughout your days to help also calm your mind and your body.

If you can afford to hire a wedding planner make sure you interview several before choosing one and then sit down with them to cast your vision and ask questions.

By hiring a wedding planner, you will eliminate a lot of the small and large details you are responsible for when planning a wedding and enable you to better focus on the bigger picture of marriage and the wedding.

An experienced wedding planner will be able to ask you the right questions to co-create your dream wedding and head off a lot of unexpected things without a lot of stress to you.

While wedding planning inevitable involves stress, you can minimize the stress by communicating expectations to your partner, setting firm boundaries from the beginning, practicing gratitude and mindfulness and by potentially hiring a planner to help manage all the details.