Weddingbee Blog

I’m a bad fiancée.

It’s only happened a couple of times—I swear!—but I snapped at Mr. Ladyfingers last night over a stupid little wedding-planning detail, and I feel very, very ashamed over it.

Yes, this ashamed plus more. / Photo by Puppy90210 via Wikimedia Commons

I won’t go into the gory details, but suffice it to say, it was unnecessary and mean-spirited. I said many things that I didn’t feel and that aren’t true. Things along the lines of me having to do everything and him doing nothing and not caring.

Gah.

We kissed and made up, and I told him how verrah, verrrrrrahhhh sorry I am, and went into a spiel about how stressed out I am. Not that it excused it, but it served as a sort of explanation.

“I’m under a lot of pressure at work, which is good pressure, but it’s still pressure, and I feel bad, like I’m not spending enough time with friends, and the wedding to-do list is a mile long…”

And he stopped me and said, “Then why don’t you back off the wedding a little bit?”

I gasped. “BECAUSEILUFFIT!”

Well, we can’t have our cake and eat it, too (though I don’t really get that cliché since I frequently have cake in my possession and eat it as well, but whatever). Either I embrace my wedding-planning spreadsheet and the growing pile of craft supplies and shopping lists, or I apply the brakes.

Our little incident got me thinking about how to balance my life so that I don’t put all my eggs in one basket (Another cliché! Why do I have eggs in a basket??) and plunge into post-wedding depression because my life is just so empty and devoid of meaning without 150 paper flowers to make and 500 little triangle bunting-flag thingies to glue to yards and yards of ribbon.

Turns out that when I sit down and think about it, I am balancing things fairly well:

• I work out at least four times a week. I don’t know if this counts since it’s in response to wanting to lose weight for the wedding, but it makes me feel awesome because I never ever worked out before January. It helps me burn off some energy and aggression, and helps me sleep better, too. It also helped my posture and, surprisingly, my skin. So there ya go.
• I see friends four to five times per week. I also catch coffee every Friday after work with my girlfriends and go to breakfast with a group on Sunday mornings. My task this week: Have coffee with them and not bring up the wedding AT. ALL.
• I try to read non-wedding-related material. It takes me a while to get through books these days, but that’s nothing new. I’m currently on The Kennedys: An American Drama by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Next up is Keith Richards’s Life and then Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Are you catching a theme here? I kind of like biographies.
• We do date night. Most Saturday nights it’s dinner-and-a-movie time. Sometimes the movie is at home, sometimes in a theater; sometimes it’s replaced by a mighty competitive game of Trivial Pursuit. Other times, we throw in some daytime quality time, like flea market trips and early-morning beach visits. We’re both super busy, but we still make time for each other.

Since that’s about it, here are some things I’m vowing to do from now until the wedding:

• A night off. Every Tuesday is my do-nothing night. This includes wedding stuff. No talking about the wedding, no crafting, no reading about weddings. NO NO NO! We’ll see how long this lasts…
• Sunday-morning me time. I like to kick around town by myself sometimes, so Sunday mornings will be reserved for this. But! No wedding shopping. No, really.

That’s all I can think of for now—but how do you balance your life as your big day comes barreling down upon you?