Why traditional wedding planning isn’t all sunshine and roses

This is part one of a series of blogs on how I applied life and business coaching to planning our wedding in a way that challenges the traditional approach.

Is there any better feeling than being engaged? It’s like a dream come true! There’s the ring, the story and the excitement of spending your lives together.  

What no one tells you about getting engaged is how many times you will need to repeat the story and pretend you know the answer as to when are you going to get married?   

I am not going to lie I have a bug bear with this question. No sooner have you popped the champagne that you are longlisting wedding venues and trying to work out how freaking much a wedding costs!

You can’t stop people asking this question, but you can choose how you respond.

This is where I found boundaries to be soul saver. Just for a moment let’s stop and check we are all on the same page when it comes to boundaries. “Boundaries are the space between ourselves and others allowing us to love deeply without losing ourselves and resisting the expectations and demands of others” Thanks to Dr Rebecca Ray.

We decided to implement the boundary of not starting wedding planning for a month to enjoy being engaged. This meant responding to the question with “we don’t know when we are getting married because we are going to enjoy the first month of being engaged”. Here’s the thing, sometimes you will need to take a stance and hold your boundary, especially when Mum’s worry about wedding venues, but if you don’t take a stance there is no point in having the boundary in the first place.

One of the best things we did in the first month of being engaged was a date to discuss how we want wedding planning to go. Any time I coach a new workplace team you never just jump into the work and hope that everything will be sunshine and roses. Instead you take time to prepare the foundations of a great working relationship. The same applies with wedding planning.

These are the three questions we used for this date:

1.       How do you want wedding planning to go and feel?  

2.       What are your three priorities or non-negotiables for our wedding?

3.       What are we going to do when we disagree and can’t decide?

We each took turns asking these questions, listening without interrupting and agreeing on how we wanted wedding planning to feel. This didn’t stop us disagreeing (by the way fighting is healthy, but let’s save that for another day), rather when we were in a fight or things are getting tense one of us reminds the other about what we agreed, which moves us back to harmony and a solution faster.

Happy engagement and stay tuned for the next blog: ‘Why are you getting married?’