It continually amazes me how stressful planning a wedding can be. I realize the beau and I purposefully chose the route of a larger-scale wedding and reception with all our friends and family present, as opposed to the calmer course of going to the courthouse by ourselves. Therefore, on some level, we readily accepted as givens all the stressors of wedding planning. But it doesn’t make the stress any less palatable.
Courtesy http://www.infobarrel.com
I’ve found my stress comes in waves. It was worst, by far, in the first few weeks of being engaged. As someone with a proclivity (booyah for opportunities to use fancy words!) to stress and be anxious, it didn’t surprise me that I began to stress about the wedding planning virtually the instant we were engaged. What did surprise me is how bad it was. For the life of me, I couldn’t sleep. I was like a kid at Christmas too excited to find out what Santa Claus might bring me. I probably only slept a couple of hours a night the first week or two we were engaged. This was because my head was filled to the brim with ideas, to-do lists and dream sequences of various wedding-day scenarios (both good and bad!). And, I couldn’t eat. I simply wasn’t hungry – mostly because my stomach was perpetually in knots. It was as though some part of me felt like I needed to have all the wedding planning finished already. Even though we had months and months sprawling before us!
Thankfully, with each item I’ve checked off the seemingly neverending to-do list, my stress lessens. But it does pop up randomly from time to time. It’s strange what makes it rear its head. I couldn’t care less that I didn’t have a solution to my I-don’t-want-to-pay-a-gazillion-dollars-for-real-flowers conundrum. Yet, for some reason, I was getting panicky about not finding the right shoes, even though I had plenty of time. Sigh. It’s crazy how stress-inducing this process can be. And perhaps even crazier that I let it be stress inducing.
Talking it over with the hubs-to-be always makes me feel better when I start to stress. He is a constant calming force. He’s wizard-like in his mellowing abilities. He can inevitably talk me down from any frenzied state. And he reminds me time after time what’s important and what’s not. He puts things in perspective. It’s easy to remember why I’m marrying this guy and why I’m (semi) embracing all this stress!
The Frozen Southerner 