Wedding Blog
I like simplicity. I like it so much that I sometimes find myself making snap decisions about things that should never be snap-decided on. Like a wedding gown.
When Mr. Lovebug and I were originally engaged, we set a date that was seven months out. We felt ready to do the deed as soon as reasonably possible. Plus, wanting an outside wedding in the desert can really cut into your options: scorching summer days, frigid winter evenings. So we booked our venue for lovely, mild October and jumped into planning.
We booked almost all of our vendors quickly and easily. But as I delved into researching one other, slightly important detail (my wedding gown), I realized I was in a serious pinch for time. I would have to find a dress immediately if I were going to have it made and altered in time. I bought loads of magazines and scoured the internet for hours, terrified and overwhelmed.
And then, I just threw in the towel. I decided to just find something premade and simple, and forgo the stress I was surely in for. Luckily, I’m not picky. I found a very pretty gown from a company I already knew and loved–J. Crew:
And I had no hesitations whatsoever about getting married in this dress. It’s beautiful and fits fantastically. Plus, it works very well into the scheme of “modern” and “clean” that we were planning on for the wedding. But not long after ordering it, Mr. Lovebug and I decided we just wanted more time to loll about being eachother’s fiance. We postponed the wedding six months, and heaved a sigh of relief.
With the relief came a new realization: Oh, wow. Now I actually have time to get any darn dress I want. Armed with that knowledge, I brought out the magazines again–logged back onto the net, and set to fantasizing. What came next, I’ll save for another day…
But for now, I’m curious. Did anyone else change their wedding date to give themselves more time? Time to plan, maybe, or just time to enjoy the stage of engagement? Are you glad you did? Or did you then find yourselves wishing you’d kept the original date?
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My engagement period is going to be 7 months, and I think it’s just the right length for us. We’re going to be able to have all the planning done without having too much time to stress over the minutiae. I read stories of women who have bought two dresses or end up having second thoughts about major decisions like location, color scheme, etc., and I think that’s really a function of having too much time to think about it all. Wedding planning is a lot of fun so we want to think about it all the time, but when you have more time than you need there is the possibility that you begin to overthink things. My timeline is long enough to get everything done but short enough that I can get to the good stuff - being married!
We got engaged in Septemeber and if I had my way we would have gotten married in March or April but with by brother and sister in college we had to wait until t they were on summer break or a long weekend. So then I wanted to have it in August and he was willing to push it to September. We are getting married in August. I am glad we waited I havent had to compermise on anything and we are down to the last three months. Plus we got that time as you say “loll about being eachother’s fiance”.
Miss Lovebug I bought that exact same dress! I felt the same way about my wedding gown, I wanted it to be simple, understated, and cheap. Unfortunately I returned it as well, it just wasn’t special enough…..
Yes, and had to switch from a summery dress to a warm winter dress!
I did get married in that J.Crew dress, only the short version. I loved it (and I still do). We got engaged last April and married at the end of last September. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
p.s. We’re expecting our first child ten days before our anniversary!
Originally we we were going to be married this July because in September a week after we announced our engangment, my Mom was diagnosed with cancer and we didn’t want to waste time. Well she called us last week and said she’s doing great so we can delay the wedding. I’m so glad (well obviously) because now wedding planning is not so morbid and depressing.
We’re planning on getting married next summer and I’m so excited to have the luxury of time for planning instead of stressing over having to make quick decisions with limited options.
I have just one month left out of a 6 month engagement, and almost everything is done! I was nervous about the short time period at first, but it’s worked out really well for us. My fiance and I are both indecisive, so I think if we had a longer engagement we would have agonized over decisions a lot more. Instead, we’ve been really productive and on top of things out of necessity. So, as I said we’re almost done with everything, and it’s been surprisingly much less stressful than I anticipated.
That being said.. with today the one month mark, I am a little freaked out b/c the time has gone so fast. I can understand why you would want more time to enjoy that engaged feeling. At least I am glad that we don’t have too much else to stress over, so we can enjoy this last month before the wedding in excited anticipation! 
We had a blissful 6 months with absolutely NO WEDDING PLANNING after we got engaged. We decided to take some time and just enjoy that stage of our relationship without stressing about wedding details.
Although our families were frustrated that we hadn’t picked dates/locations, we had SO much fun! And it gave us time to really think about our wedding vision without rushing into any decisions.
I’m really glad we were slow starting the planning, because now, we are both so busy with planning that we sometimes lose track of what’s really important. Those 6 months were some of our best relationship!
When my FI and I first started talking about our wedding - even before he officially proposed - we had March 2008 in mind. Random month yes, but perfect for us for personal reasons.
Life, however, intervened.
A Captain in the AF, he is being reassigned to Greenland for a year. I can’t go - though I don’t know if I’d want to.
This left me with two options - plan the wedding and hope the weather isn’t bad enough that he can’t take leave next March, or postpone the wedding.
In the meantime I am MOH in my sister’s wedding in August, planning bridal showers and dresses from a few thousand miles away (Colorado). I can’t stay where I am, so I’ll be heading back to Boston the beginning of August and need to find a new home and a new job. Not exactly enough time to plan a wedding - especially when you add on the emotional heap of being apart from my FI for a year.
So now our wedding is set for March 2009. A long engagement will hopefully give me enough time to plan it perfectly, and still be able to be (somewhat) relaxed. Wish me luck!
Three of us at work got engaged the same day, and the other two couples seem to have been married for ages already–we all got engaged in March 2006, and the weddings were/are September 2006, February 2007, and June 2007 (me). All of the weddings are about the same size and roughly the same level of formality, and I think all of us believe we had the right amount of time to plan.
I bought the same dress - and ended up returning it! It fit really well and I really liked it…until I tried on dresses in a bridal salon. It just wasn’t my “dream” dress.
We will be engaged for almost 18 months by the time we get married. I originially thought we would get married sometime this summer, but now are getting married in Dec (my sister got engaged and married in 6 months during our engagement!). I am happy to have the extra time to really decide what I want, but it can get tiring always thinking about the wedding. Even when I want to take a break, my mind doesn’t stop.;-)
I got engaged in February of this year and am planning a September wedding - almost seven months, to the day, after we got engaged. My entire family lives 15 hours away and my mom freaked at the idea of only (only!) having seven months to plan. And now, 136 days out, I am SO ready for it to be September!! I am very much a type A uber planner, but, very much against type, I just want to say, “to heck with the details” and just be married already. Perhaps that comes from not living with my fiance and hating saying goodbye to him every evening, but I am oh-so-ready to be married! September - hurry to me!
Yup we postponed ours too! I’ve always wanted an August wedding because where I live (Vancouver), it’s my best shot at a rain-free outdoor garden ceremony. Many brides have the same idea, so August weddings here get booked up sometimes over 12 months in advance. So when my fiance proposed at Christmas, I knew I’d better get on the venue booking ASAP if I wanted an August 2007 wedding! Unfortunately it wasn’t soon enough, and as I’d feared, all the venues we actually liked were already booked.
So we put it off till next August. It turned out to be the best decision for a number of reasons even though we only made the decision due to the venue availability. Now my overseas guests have more time to budget for the trip, so more of them are going to come. I was getting very stressed at the short timeline and suffering some pretty significant nightmares and insomnia, which both stopped immediately when we postponed the wedding. Now I feel like I have all the time I need to book all my vendors without stress, and I am booking so far in advance that I basically have my pick of the best vendors. And lastly… the very unexpected part of my engagement were the feelings of trepidation and doubt that came along with the proposal. I had been ready for so long to get married that all of a sudden when I was engaged, I was completely taken by surprise by these negative feelings (loss of independence, changing my name, taking a leap of faith on the future etc). I realized I simply needed time to work through them and now I am feeling confident and in love again. I can’t imagine if I’d had to commit to non-refundable deposits with vendors while I was feeling nervous about the relationship though, it would have only added to the stress.
So really it’s all worked out for the best that our engagement went from being 8 months long to 20 months.
We got engaged in December and will be married 10 months later, in October. We live in Texas, and as anyone can attest, summers here are gross! My FSIL got married last August, and in my stapless dress I felt so yucky I couldn’t imagine wearing a puffy, insulated, layered getup - never mind how my FSIL wore a dress that had a long-sleeved lacy thing (no idea what the right term is - it’s kind of a jacket that went over the whole thing and was the length of the dress itself.)
FH said no December or January because of Christmas stuff. I said absolutely no June, July, August or first part of September because of the heat. So our options were to either plan a wedding (and solicit funds, no less) in the 5 month pre-summer window, or aim for the fall*. I wanted November, but given that my family is literally scattered on both coasts and everywhere in between, we figured it might be a strain on some of them to come in the first weekend of November for a wedding, go home for two weeks, then have to come back for Thanksgiving.
We did briefly toy with a Thanksgiving wedding, going so far as to envision a joint family Thanksgiving (rehearsal) dinner. But, since we are getting married in the city where all of his family is, and my family would all be traveling in, they wouldn’t have been able to help out with any part of the dinner, which didn’t seem fair. I think the deal breaker, though, was how selfish I felt when I thought about my (step)brothers missing out on holiday time with their father because they were all in some other city for me.
So we decided on October, where the weather would be nice, no holidays would be ruined, and our college friends wouldn’t yet be in the end-of-the-semester stress mode. Then we consulted the football schedule of our alma mater and came up with a date!
*I know we could have postponed it until 08, but I’ve been planning to marry this guy before our first anniversary, and we’ll be marrying just shy of our 3.5 year mark. It was time, by George!
Lou: congratulations! And great taste! 
I am glad we’ve postponed, it’s great to be able to shelve these concerns for a few months. The irony is, I’ll probably end up shelving them so long, I’ll end up in a last-minute rush. Though actually, as we’ve already booked all my “first pick” vendors, I should be able to rest easy.
We postponed our wedding 3 weeks before the date-4/01/07. We got to that point and we were so stressed out. We were trying so hard to make everyonw else happy that we lost sight of what the wedding was about-celebrating our love, not parental expectations. We went and got the deposits back and now we have started back at the beginning. We sat down and came up with a clear idea of what would make us happy. It means changing everything. I comprimised with my dress, now I am going to sell it and get my dream dress. We haven’t set a date yet, instead I’ve been looking for the perfect vendors and we will coordinate all of them for a late 08-early 09 event. I am so much happier and less stressed. It was the best desision we came to.
I’m also getting married in Tucson, and was faced with the same 3 (maybe 4 months) you were. Initially we decided on April of 08, but after finding some dificulty in getting the vendors and locations we wanted, we postponed to October 11, 2008. Everytime I get the least bit stressed or freaked out, I know I have a whole 17 months to figure it out!
I postponed from August to Decmber of this year to give us more time. My sweetie is a professor so our only long-break options are summer or Christmas holidays and I didn’t want to delay it a whole year.
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Mrs. Lovebug, Tucson
Age and Occupation in 06: 31, Writer
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, Professional Game Show Contestant
Engagement Date: February 18, 2007
Wedding Date: April 19, 2008
Venue: Historic Inn
About Me: Likes: blogging, wikis, semi-colons, cuddling, fragrant flowers, syntax, and spooning. Dislikes: typos, dangling modifiers, flypaper, citronella candles, and run-ons. If I had my druthers, I'd exchange simple vows in a candlelit library. But I lost my druthers long ago...anyone seen them?
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