How soon did you start wedding planning?

Almost immediately, to be honest LMAO

FH and I began discussing what type of wedding we wanted right away. But didn’t actually start the planning process for several months after the engagement.

I knew my husband was the one for me a few months into dating. It took him a bit longer to realize that though. We dated for 8 years before we got engaged! We had been living together at the time of our engagement, and had been for about 5 years. Needless to say, I was certain I was going to marry him. We had discussed it prior to getting engaged and agreed it's what we wanted. So for me, I definitely had started planning well before we got engaged! I knew some things I wanted, the location of the reception and some details. Once we got engaged, I started immediately! We got married 8 weeks later because he was getting ready to deploy and we definitely wanted to be married before then. But for us, it was immediately after engagement!

We got engaged in April and didn't really start any meaningful research until 4 months later. We are both from New England and currently live in Colorado, and the very first thing we both knew we wanted was to have our wedding back on the east coast. That being said, we knew that there would be quite a bit more travel involved with this decision... flights back to check out venues, flights back to do tastings, flights back for our actual wedding day, etc. We opted for a long engagement because it just made the most sense for us: more time to plan, more time to save money, and a whole lot less stress. And I must say, I'm thoroughly enjoying every moment of our long engagement and would recommend it to anybody. We committed to each other far before we got engaged so why rush the wedding?

I started planning with a few days of getting engaged. We had our ceremony and reception venues booked within a month lol. I found our DJ and photographer less than 2 months into our engagement. Our engagement will have been a total of 19 1/2 months by the time we get married, but October is a super popular wedding month and I wanted my pick of vendors!

This is my fiance's second marriage and he asked that we have at lease a 1 year engagement. His first wedding was 7 months after the engagement and he felt it was very rushed to plan everything. We got engaged Sept. 1st of 2019 and will be married Nov. 28th of 2020. We started looking for the reception venue right away to make sure we got the one we wanted, but the rest of the planning has been very laid back and everything is falling together as expected without being rushed.

I started planning the wedding maybe a few months after the proposal. I've found this extremely difficult to do especially since the wedding is in a different country. At this point I'm 268 days out from the wedding...I have the venue, photographer, and makeup artist for the family. Should I have a back up hairstylist just in case mine cannot travel with me? Is it rude to tell her that I have someone just in case that she cannot go unexpectedly?