Why are you getting married?

Why are you getting married? It’s not meant to be a trivial question but it’s a question we often skip over and jump to the details. What type of wedding dress do you want? How many bridesmaids will you have?

Priya Parker who wrote The Art of Gathering, explains the first step of meaningful gatherings is committing to a bold purpose. A great purpose is specific, unique, and disputable. Let me explain. If you have a wedding purpose of celebrating love it doesn’t help you make any decisions. You end up battling over the guest list and worrying about decorations.  A great purpose stops you losing sleep over decisions and the key thing we have learnt is that a purpose should not (and cannot) please everyone!

Are you convinced you need think about your purpose yet? If not, here’s how we used our purpose. Ours is “gratitude for the people who have supported our relationship and will continue to support it”. It’s made it easy for us to choose to invite my parents amazing friends who have supported my parents and in turn us when my Dad was sick. On the other hand, we decided not to invite a school friend, her husband and parents that I have lost touch with, even though I went to their wedding with my parents. Yes, I feel guilty about it but if I come back to the purpose, it is a much easier decision.

You might be wondering how do we create a purpose for our wedding?  Here is how we approached it asking these questions:

-          What do we want to be different post our wedding?

-          Why do we want people to come to our wedding?

-          Does our purpose potentially upset some people and help us decide?

I can honestly say creating our purpose was one of the best things we have done. Every time you need to make a decisions such as table settings, bridesmaids dresses and to have a wedding cake we always ask ourselves, does this add to the purpose? If not we de-proritise it. And for the guys out there, my fiancé even uses it to pull me into line when I get carried away – but occasionally I still jump up and down because it’s something that really matters to me, like flowers.

I would love to know: what is your purpose?

Enjoy engagement and stay tuned for the final blog are you planning a wedding or a marriage?