Late Thoughts on My Wedding

A friend of mine recently got married and I was speaking with her about her experience with her wedding and it prompted me to write this blog post.

When my wife and I first got engaged we originally thought we could pull off planning the wedding in about four months and then felt that was totally overwhelming and so we pushed it out a year from our original date so we had 16 months. That was much less stressful! Although I think the "perfect" amount of time would have been around 9 - 10 months.

We originally planned to invite about 50 people but that number slowly grew closer to 75. We ended up with about 70 people attending because the invite listed was tweaked and some people RSVP'ed "+1" even though we didn't invite them with a guest. Fortunately no one showed up with a guest (or multiple guests!) that we did not know about ahead of time. We also sent out "backup" invites to people we didn't originally invite but decided we could once we had a certain number of "No"s from our first set of invites.

On some level I wish we had invited fewer people - but I think in the end we wouldn't have gotten to spend any more time with our guests; the wedding was no stop movement from one thing to the next including a pass through the dining room to say hello to everyone.

Although we didn't have any issues with family fights, we did know there were people coming to the wedding whose point of views on life (politics, religion, etc.) wouldn't mesh and so we made sure to seat them as far away from each other as possible.

Finally, we knew going in we wouldn't be able to control everything on the big day and there were things that went wrong, like the programs arriving to the ceremony late and so everyone was sitting around wondering why we hadn't started. Or our dog being fixated on the horses and not wanting to walk down the isle! But all in all it was a great day and we had lots of fun both planning and participating in the wedding.