Wedding Planning

I foolishly hoped that once we were engaged there would be a grace period of about a month or two before the wedding planning really ramped up. I quickly learned that I was wrong. As soon as the next day I found myself searching for wedding venues online, calling for availability and scheduling tours. It seems that now brides are scheduling wedding dates and venues 18-24 months out, and already availability for the following summer/fall was limited. I can’t say that Jill has turned into a crazed bride or that either of us are difficult people to deal with, but it is astonishing how much stuff needs to get done. I guess up until now I’ve taken for granted all the work that goes into wedding planning. The devil is definitely in the details, and that’s when I realized that this was definitely going to be more than I bargained for.

The next weekend we began our venue hunt, which lasted nearly a month. Any free time during that period was devoted to driving all over North East, from Newport to New Rochelle. Towards the end of the process, tensions were definitely elevated. My mom and I were butting heads, my dad was rolling his eyes and Jill and I were definitely a little testy with each other. There was a point at which I thought my parents would not talk to me again until we had decided on a place, which can pose quite a problem when you work directly with your father.  After an exhaustive search, we decided on the Society Room in Hartford, which, up until we visited it, did not seem to be of much interest to either of us. We were shocked when we got there as to how unique the venue was and both instantly got that ‘this was it’ feeling when we left. After a couple of drinks at City Steam across the street, we ran back to sign the contract that day.

I thought things would calm down after that, seeing as the venue is arguably the largest decision to be made during the entire process, but then I realized having a date and location secured only opened up the door for a dozen other things that now ‘needed’ to get done. I soon learned that every detail was tantamount to the next, with just as much emphasis and effort being devoted to the font on the save the dates as was being expended to find a band or photographer.  After a month or two of chaos things have finally calmed down. With the holidays approaching we are happy to have a lot of this behind us, but we both know that there is still a mountain to climb in the horizon, and to date we have barely just left base camp.