Weddingbee Blog

Planning a wedding is hard. Your degree of involvement in the planning process can determine just how hard, but no matter what, it’s difficult. There is one up-side, though: Prioritizing becomes a little simpler.

When you’ve got a hard, set goal to work toward, and when society deems that goal The Biggest Day of Your Life, it’s easy to put it first. When I was planning my wedding, my priorities were simple: 1) Wedding planning stuff. 2) Exercising so that I would look decent on The Biggest Day of My Life. And 3) Work. I knew I was going to need my paycheck to cover the wedding expenses, after all.

Spending time with friends is incredibly important while you’re in the middle of the planning process, because they’re your support system. But when you have to ditch them to go to a cake tasting, they understand. And your boss understands when you’re spacing out at your desk while gazing at photos of peonies. Because it’s your wedding. It’s important, and then it’s over. Then you get back to business.

I’m sure I’m not alone in assuming that after the wedding, my life would be infinitely easier. I thought I would be able to just let go and finally relax in the new life I’d created with my husband. And while I do love my new life (which isn’t actually so different from my old life), still - I was so wrong. So, so wrong.

See, as it turns out, when you go from a lifestyle of eating consciously and exercising daily to one of constantly demolishing pizzas and sitting on the couch, your body doesn’t just forgive you and let it slide because you “deserve a break.”

“Oh, no. My plate is empty. Again.”

In fact, you wake up four months later and realize that your body is punishing you. You’ve gained 18 pounds, and your metabolism has slowed down to keep you at that new weight, so you’re going to have to work infinitely harder to get rid of it.

Meanwhile, the things that were important to you pre-wedding haven’t gone away. Your friends were so patient while you were being the crazy bride lady, so after the wedding, you want to be the best friend you can be. You want to entertain them with all your fancy new wedding dinnerware and cookware and serveware, and while you’re at it, you want to keep all your new stuff looking nice in your new Married Person Grown-Up Home. Your boss was so nice to let you slack off for 15 months straight, so you want to show him or her that it was worth the wait, because you’re the best employee EVER.

And if you’re like me, maybe you learned something new about yourself during the wedding planning process. Maybe you revived a passion for blogging, or discovered a love of DIY, or maybe, like so many of my fellow bees, you realized that you just love weddings and you want to go into the event planning business. Whatever it is, that needs to fit into your priorities, too.

Balancing everything (while writing 178 thank you cards is), to say the least, difficult. Maybe more difficult than wedding planning. Because there’s no end in sight. There’s no hard, set goal to work for. You’re just trying to find a lifestyle that works for you, and rewards you, and keeps you close to the people you love. They were so patient while you were wedding planning, after all.

Has anyone else struggled with finding a way to get to the place you’re going to be in for the rest of your life?