Wedding Blog

Once we had settled on the Dominican Republic for our wedding, the time came to pick a resort.

Thanks to all the helpful advice from my new travel forum friends, I narrowed it down to Punta Cana relatively easily – relative, that is, to how tough picking the actual resort was. Although I’m sure Puerto Plata was also lovely (and generally cheaper too), I just couldn’t say no to the promise of fine white sands, for which Punta–whoawhoaWHOA– let’s back up the bus a moment here.

Did I just say picking the actual resort was tough? Tough??

Yeah, it was tough, if tough means COUNTLESS hours sitting with my butt on the couch and my laptop on my knees, scrolling through pages and pages of reviews and photos and forum comments, and filling brochures with enough flower-shaped Post-It notes to wallpaper our entire apartment. My head was spinning trying to keep track of which places had the coolest-looking pools, which places were kid-friendly, which had that nasty review about the bug problem and which had the greatest-sounding restaurants.

I was obsessed. I was consumed with making absolutely, one hundred and twelve percent sure that we were picking THE absolute bestest resort we could possibly pick for our wedding.

And why? Sure, I wanted the day itself to go well. But that wasn’t entirely it.

It’s because I was agonizing over which details and features would make our guests happy. I had to not only pick A resort, but the PERFECT resort.

I know this is not news. I’d say probably every bride has to, at some point, deal with making family members happy: with seating plans, with meal options, with speech lengths and so many other details of the day. But I can’t help wondering if having to pick the place where your family and friends have to stay for an entire week doesn’t take it to a different level.

At any rate, I’m willing to bet that whoever said ‘your wedding day is about you’ didn’t have to pick a resort.

The thing that made me so terrified was that I was convinced that if there was something–anything–wrong with that resort, I’d be the one they’d blame for their ruined vacation. It had to be ‘perfect’.

So once I finally got my shortlist of resorts down to four, how did I know which was the perfect one?

Source

I wish I could say I flew to an ashram in India one day and got all-Zen-like, a la Eat, Pray, Love and the answer just… came… to me, but it didn’t happen that way.

I did it the hard way, the way a lot of brides end up doing it. I got so stressed out by it all to the point where I just completely LOST it one day and had a major meltdown.

I’m not proud of it. But it was worth it. Because once the frustrated waterworks show was over and all my emotions were drained, my brain finally kicked in. I realized that–here’s the amazing part, are you ready for this?–the one you choose will be The One… because there is no ‘perfect’ one.

So I did.

Eureka.

Am I the only one who had to learn this the hard way?