Weddings are a fantastic thing – an incredible celebration of all that is good in the world – love, friendship, sharing and happiness. Someone’s wedding day is a huge life-changing event and it rightfully deserves the level of care and attention afforded to it by the couple and, more often than not, the bride in particular. But so often we hear about so called Bridezillas who become so consumed with the desire for everything to be perfect that they lose all perspective on what their wedding is actually about and, whilst I’ve been lucky enough to work with absolutely lovely Brides and avoid witnessing any bridezilla moments, sadly I suspect it’s becoming more and more common.
I recognise, of course, that I’m providing a male perspective on this and that therefore you might quite rightly say that I can’t truly understand how a bride feels about their wedding day and I certainly don’t claim to. Having been very close to many couples on their wedding day it’s become quite clear to me that, on the whole, the way that the bride and groom feel about their wedding day is equally powerful yet completely different, but looking back over all the many weddings I’ve been to as well as my own wedding day, it seems to me that at the end of the day all those things that can turn a perfectly rational soon-to-be-bride into an absolute monster are the things that are often completely forgotten about the moment the guests depart and it does make me wonder – was it worth all of the aggravation?
Because there is so much planning that inevitably goes into a wedding it’s easy for it to become an absolute obsession, with every last detail having to be absolutely perfect. Everything is carefully regimented, scheduled and organised so that it must run exactly to plan with not a hair out of place. For some people it seems that the wedding becomes more about that idea of perfection than about the actual act of getting married and I think that’s really quite sad. The thing is (and again maybe this is a bloke thing but don’t forget that roughly 50% of your guests probably are going to be blokes), I can never remember any of that “stuff” that Bridezillas spend their wedding day stressing so much about.
Things go wrong, schedules get broken before the day has even truly begun, there are always slight imperfections, someone will forget the part they’re supposed to play, something won’t turn up, the fire alarm will go off… you can’t control every last detail and you’ll enjoy the day so much more if you don’t fully try to. Of course you want everything to look great and so you should, but don’t worry about it so much that you forget to enjoy yourself because at the end of the day it just doesn’t matter.
When I’m a guest at a wedding I can’t remember what the cake looked like, I can’t remember whether there were exactly 6 daffodils on every table or whether there was a slight delay at one point of the day. I remember how happy my two friends were, I remember laughing with them and exchanging stupid dance moves, I remember that look of pride in their parent’s eyes and I remember the personal touches they put on the day that were just so… them. I’m not saying that all the decoration and the theme they had taken so much care over doesn’t matter – all those details are lovely and I can remember it definitely looked fantastic on the day and it will of course always hold memories for them, but what I am saying is that if you’re worrying about them so much that you’re not enjoying yourself either in the run up to or on the day itself then you’re forgetting about the two things that really make a wedding truly special and completely memorable: the bride and groom.
So Brides, if you feel a terrible Jekyll and Hyde like transformation starting to take place within then just remember what really matters. Details are great, being organised is no bad thing, but don’t let either impede rather than add to your enjoyment of the happiest day of your life. After the day everything else becomes a blur, but no-one will forget the day they saw their friend become the happiest bride they’ve ever seen.
