Wedding planning can be overwhelming. Find out how to stay whelmed with advice for your planning, your stag or hen do, ceremony, and reception.
And we have advice from real couples on the best ideas you should steal – and what you should avoid – from their weddings.
The hardest part of planning a wedding – harder than finding the perfect venue (and the perfect date), picking your wedding party without hurting anyone’s feelings, and whittling down your guest list – is finding the right wedding suppliers for your day.
Because, no matter how meticulously you plan everything else – no matter the time, and effort, and pinning you put into it – if you don’t have wedding vendors who get you and get what style you’re going for, your wedding won’t come out as you expect.
What should you do if someone you love dies in the lead-up to your wedding?
It feels like an impossible position – carry on with the wedding, when you’re in anything but a party mood, or delay it and risk losing deposits, suppliers, and other guests.
That’s the problem Grief-Stricken wrote into us about. (Before lockdown, I should add!)
Hi Problem Pal. I don’t know what to do.
My grandmother passed away a few weeks ago, out of no where. We’re all surprised and absolutely devastated.
I’m meant to be getting married next month but I just can’t imagine going ahead with it at the moment. It feels disrespectful to have a big party right now, and I know none of my family will be in the right frame of mind for it.
But, if we don’t go ahead, we’ll lose all our deposits, and I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford to have the wedding we had planned if we have to pay for everything twice.
I know my fiancée wants to go ahead. She’s being super supportive and saying it’s up to me, but I can tell she’s upset at the thought of having to get a different, cheaper venue. It took us a long time to find and we made a lot of decisions around it. If we had to start again, it would be like throwing it away and planning a whole new wedding.
I want to have the wedding we had planned, but it doesn’t feel right to have it now, so close to the funeral. What should we do?
We’re very happy to report that nowadays it’s easier than ever to have an eco-friendly wedding that can still be the wedding that you’ve dreamed of. Not only does it help our wonderful Mother Earth, but it also often means a simpler budget and less planning panic in the run up – and all without compromising any aesthetic or fun on the day. (Of course!)
We’re biased, but we do think a wedding website is a pretty brilliant way of keeping your wedding eco-friendly (in fact, it’s a totally waste-free way of sending out details and recording responses). Here’s a few other sustainable wedding ideas…
We’ve been steering clear of the ‘C’ word at Gettin’ Hitched Rocks HQ. Amid all the uncertainty and concern, we wanted to give couples a Corona-free place to focus on something fun, something to look forward to when the quarantine is lifted.
But Coronavirus has impacted so many couples – and will impact so many more – that we realised the best way to offer advice on planning a stress-free wedding right now is to tackle it head-on: this is our practical guide to postponing your wedding, during lockdown.
Hello Problem Pal. My fiancée and I are in an awkward situation and we hoped you could give us some advice.
We have a good friend, Tahani, who likes throwing big get togethers with friends she knows from all different walks of life. We never spend time with her alone nowadays, we only ever see her in a big group.
Because of this, we’ve become friendly with some of her other friends, Chidi and Eleanor. We’re not close enough friends to spend time with them without Tahani – we don’t even have their phone numbers! – but we get on well when we chat at parties and we’re friends on Facebook.
Now to the problem: our wedding venue has quite limited space. When we were working out our guest list, we didn’t even think of Chidi and Eleanor. We had a hard enough time fitting in our family and close friends, never mind friends of friends!
But we invited Tahani – and Tahani has assumed Chidi and Eleanor are coming. She’s told them all about the day and even talked about car pooling with them!
She told us about it casually – like it wouldn’t even be a question that these people who we’ve hung around with maybe five times in total would be coming to our wedding – and now we don’t know what to do.
I feel awkward about it and think maybe we should find some room for them from somewhere to avoid hurting any feelings, but my fiancée doesn’t want to give up space at our small wedding for friends of a friend.
What should we do?
– In The Bad Place (Guest List Planning)
A wedding website is one of the most useful tools you have to help plan your wedding. (And I’m not just saying that because I’m massively biased.)
A wedding website can organise your guests, remind people to RSVP on time, collate everything you need to know in one place, and save you having to answer the same question over and over again. (Are there more beautiful, voice-saving words in the English language than, ‘It’s on the website’?)
We’ve spoken before about how useful they are (so useful) – but what do you need to have on your wedding website to make it useful? What information do your guests need to know?
We’ve put together a list of the 6 things you need to have on your wedding website.
Already Owns Enough Toasters has written into our Problem Pal advice column with a worry a lot of couples have:
Can you ever ask for money for your wedding or will everyone think you’re being rude?
My fiancé and I have been living together for a long time and we already have everything we need.
We’re getting married in France and we don’t want our family to have to bring presents with them. And we don’t want to haul them back, either!
Can we ask for money without it coming across the wrong way?
Yes. Yes you can.
Yes. You do have to write thank you cards for your wedding.
While there are a lot of wedding traditions you can take or leave, thank you cards are about manners. Wedding guests go all out, gifting money and expensive presents – even if you’ve asked them not to!
A hand-written thank you card shows you appreciate what they’ve done to support you.
But hand-writing thank you cards doesn’t mean risking RSI. There are a few things you can do to make it easier on yourself – while still making the cards feel personal and appreciated.
The word ‘wedding’ conjures a fixed image for people, based on hundreds of years of tradition. A diamond ring. A white dress. A cringey disco.
But some of those ‘must-have’ wedding traditions aren’t even that traditional. (White dresses only got popular in 1840!) And they probably aren’t you, either.
Here’s the thing: your day should feel like your day. With the time, money, and effort you put into your wedding, you should have a day you love, that reflects you and your partner – not snobby etiquette writers from 1803.
It can be hard to feel you can push back on wedding traditions – especially when everyone from your in-laws to your dog walker keeps telling you you need to do this or you’ll regret not doing that.
But you don’t have to have anything at your wedding that you don’t love. Really.
Right Place, Wrong Time has written into our Problem Pal advice column with a problem that will sound familiar to anyone who’s looking for their perfect wedding venue.
My fiance and I have been looking for a venue for our wedding all year. It feels like we haven’t had a weekend where we’ve done anything but drive out to stately homes or talk to hotels about packages, but none of them have been right. We can’t imagine having the wedding we want at any of them.
Until…! Last week, we finally found the perfect venue! It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for – and it’s even in our budget! The problem is, when we asked them about dates, they said they didn’t have any more until the end of next year – and they didn’t have any spring dates for the next two years?!
I want to cry. I don’t want to look for another venue but I don’t want to put my wedding off for years either. What should I do?