Soon-to-be Mrs, learn from our Mistakes.

I got married in July 2019. If I could go back and change anything, I would have asked one of my other friends to be in my wedding instead of one of the bridesmaids I did have. The morning of the wedding she kept disappearing to go smoke and spend time with her husband who was a groomsman. When it came time for pictures, no one knew where she was and someone had to hunt her down. I also would have picked a different florist. My husband didn't like her to begin with, but she was the florist for my brother's wedding and they were very happy with her. My bouquets were falling apart. Mine was literally glued together. My sister-in-law had flowers falling out during the reception and flowers fell out of the groomswoman's during photos. Some of the flowers were also the wrong color and she forgot the pin that was supposed to be my something old. Another issue I had was my jewelry went missing the morning of my wedding. The night before I shared a hotel room with my grandparents so I stored all of my stuff in their room including my jewelry. The morning of the wedding my grandmother rushed me out of the room because she didn't want me to wake my grandfather. I ended up just grabbing everything as quickly as possible. My mom and bridesmaids spent 30-45 minutes searching for my jewelry so I didn't get as many photos with my bridesmaids as I would have liked and I have no up close photos of my jewelry. I also highly recommend letting bridesmaids decide on their own style of dress. My maid of honor decided a week before the wedding that she hated the dress I picked even though she was there when I picked it out. I ended up purchasing a completely different dress by the same designer in her size and having it shipped to her for it to be altered.

I wouldn't do anything differently.

However, I do say, do your *own thing*. Make as many choices as possible together, or cede the decision to whomever cares the most, after talking about it. When you make the day about the two of you, it's going to be amazing.

DH and I worked really hard to plan jointly, which was super hard, but it paid off, because it's been nearly 9 months, and we still think the day was perfect. I'm at the point where my only complaint is a tiny piece of lace on my bodice wouldn't stay upright! Which is perfectly ridiculous.

I would not have added that extra hour to the reception because everyone pretty much left after we cut the cake. I would have sent things off earlier to Vista Print! Also, I would have taken my getting ready pictures instead of waiting for the all the girls to get there, so I have no robe pictures. Besides that everything was PERFECT!!

It was $400 for an extra hour and we decided to add it because 45% of our guest were from out of town, so it would give us time to talk and they could meet DH. But, once we cut the cake all the locals left, so it did look VERY empty! We had 123 guest, so once we cut the cake it went down to about 55ish people..

I wouldn't change anything. But this isn't a brag, I promise. I think it's because I very deliberately planned a super simple wedding in a very short time, and I kept everyone else out of the planning (except my future husband, of course). That meant there wasn't really anything to go wrong, get hung up on, feel I wasted money on, and no dealing with others providing input I didn't want or attaching strings to their money (we paid for everything ourselves).

I acknowledge my type of wedding isn't for anything, but I would absolutely 100% encourage anyone planning now to look at all the stress the poor couples affected by the pandemic are going though (and I REALLY feel for them) and work hard to cut out anything unnecessary (you get to define unnecessary). More details = more stress (meaning, more to go wrong).