Weddingbee Blog

Yesterday I was sort of damning the fact that Mr. Jam and I didn’t plan too much in the year we’ve been engaged, and now with just months to go, we’ll likely be busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.

However, however, however. I woke up singing a different tune today. Because in that year since we’ve been engaged, our lives have changed, our ideas have changed, and our taste in weddings has (so drastically) changed.

These photos are from this website, which I covet for cool pick-me-ups. This post actually made me want to bust out the Dr. Martens boots again, srsly.

Can you even believe I went to like every single bridal expo in the Chicagoland vicinity when we first got engaged regardless of whether or not they had free drinks and things I actually wanted to see?! I know…shocking. And they were those big-box “Leave us your e-mail address so we can send you tons of SPAM” sorts of expos that boasted one limo service after another and super bland photography companies that crank out 5,000 weddings a year.

Thankfully, I got tired of that really quickly.

But along with our excitement about being newly engaged and planning a wedding, we started scouting vendors and scooping them up for fear our date—a Saturday in June—would be booked solid by all we encountered. And without doing as much comparison as we really should have, we completely and utterly made some wrong decisions.

Shame on us. Ugh.

Do we have regrets? Definitely. Did we go through a phase of talking about it on a daily basis and screaming about our mistakes and wishing we hadn’t been so quick in choosing someone before we looked around for a few months? YES.

So, brides- and grooms-to-be who are planning during a long engagement, learn from our huge mistake and follow this handy-dandy advice:

1. Do not book vendors without thoroughly researching their competition and their competition’s prices. Check out review sites and read every single review from actual clients. Stalk their website and blog like a crazyperson and get a feel for their work—and them.

2. If possible, try not to make huge, important decisions based on what you like right at this moment. Odds are within the next year or months, your taste will change. Tear your eyes away from the “All Wedding Inspiration, All the Time” blogs and think about what matters to you…not the trends you’re seeing on unrealistic sites.

3. And if you, like us, have made a decision you are now regretting, you have two options: Suck it up, or lose your deposit and do something about it. Not wanting to say goodbye to the money? Then deal with it. Stop whining about doing things differently and focus on the importance of the wedding itself: A celebration of two people coming together and dancing, laughing, partying, and loving. Maybe right now your wedding aesthetic is “ruined,” but will it even matter in the long run? Believe it or not, the wedding is more than details, friends.

Number three took a looooong time for us to accept, believe me. And you know what? Sometimes we still just smack our heads and wallow in regret. But you know what else? It’s worthless. And time consuming, when we really should be figuring out other important things, like where is the ceremony even going to take place and who the heck is going to officiate?!

Anybody else out there feeling our pain? Did you jump into wedding planning without doing your homework? Are your heads sore from smacking them, too? Let’s chat about long engagements.