11 Things I Wish I Knew Before Planning My Wedding
Photo by Sara Miller Photography.
On April 20th, 2024 I married my favorite person at an all-inclusive venue in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. The day was incredible, everything I could have dreamed and more, but that doesn’t mean the months leading up to it were a blissful period in my life. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing about the day itself but there are a few things I wish I’d known before starting to plan.
Make a joint email account
I always thought that joint email accounts were like landlines: a technological living fossil only used by couples in their 70s. This is not the case. One of my few regrets is failing to create a joint email account before we got married for three reasons.
The first and most frustrating reason is that, in a heterosexual couple, vendors will almost always email the bride. In many aspects of our relationship, neither my husband nor I subscribe to traditional gender roles. He took on as much if not more wedding planning than I did but, even when he directly emailed a vendor, every single one of them emailed their response to me. I tried adding him as a CC, I explicitly mentioned that he was included in the email thread, and yet everyone still only replied to me. I couldn’t even convince our vendors to “reply all.”
The people we worked with weren’t doing this to be sexist: vendors generally want to email one point person to avoid communication errors. Assuming the point person is the bride, however, is annoyingly dated. A joint email would have allowed us to circumvent weird, gendered assumptions while keeping communication organized for the vendors.
The second reason is what happened to my inbox. We used Zola for the majority of our wedding planning (more on that later) which requires you to connect your account to an email address. Were I not in panic mode, it might have occurred to me to change our notification settings. Unfortunately, hindsight is 20-20 and I got an email every single time someone RSVP-ed, updated their RSVP, or bought something off our registry. With an invite list of 200 people and a final guest count of 117, I got a lot of emails all directly to my personal inbox. The constant pinging and digital clutter this created only added to my stress level.
The third and final reason is that we wound up needing one anyway. The week after our wedding, my husband and I went to open our first joint bank account. Our bank required an email address for banking alerts and, rather than choose one of our personal emails, my husband quickly created a joint Gmail account. It was free, took mere minutes, and I wish we had done it months earlier.
Bridal parties can be useful
Despite having a relatively large event, my husband and I were determined to keep our wedding planning as simple as possible. Having spent far too much time on the Wedding Shaming subreddit, not having a bridal party seemed like a surefire way to limit drama. I imagined a wedding party as just one more thing to manage and organize. This might be true if you have 10 bridesmaids but bridal parties serve a purpose above and beyond getting wasted on a bachelorette weekend.
A good bridal party can handle some of the many tasks involved in planning a wedding, especially on your actual wedding day. Having someone I knew I could ask to remove my things from the venue at the end of the night would have eliminated one of the very few stressors on my wedding day.
Before the ceremony, I invited several of my dearest friends to relax in the bridal suite with me and they wound up acting as unofficial bridesmaids without me asking. When my zipper broke, they pinned my dress back up. Someone kept me hydrated all afternoon. Three of them wrangled my tulle cape to steam out the wrinkles. Even if they didn’t stand up at the altar with me, making them bridesmaids would have acknowledged and honored the important role they played both on my wedding day and in my life leading up to that moment.
All-inclusive venues can be a lifesaver
Both my husband and I have ADHD and, despite how well we manage our work and home life, the thought of organizing a relatively large wedding was daunting. As we researched, it became increasingly clear that traditional wedding planning where we would be responsible for organizing everything from linens to flowers was not a fit for us. Luckily, we aren’t the only ones who feel this way.
Like an all-inclusive resort where your meals and drinks are included in the price of your stay, an all-inclusive wedding venue provides many odds and ends you’d ordinarily have to source yourself. In our case, the venue provided almost everything we needed: tables, chairs, linens and plates, flowers, catering, cake, DJ, bartenders, and two day-of coordinators. We had to provide the alcohol, officiant, and small items like seating charts and table numbers but it was far from the seemingly impossible list of details we would have been responsible for at a traditional venue. The venue offered a great list of recommended vendors for all the services they didn’t provide. It made the entire experience that much easier.
Price-wise, we stayed comfortably within our budget. I’m not sure whether we spent more or less because of the all-inclusive venue but we certainly saved on stress and time spent planning. Despite picking details off a list, the wedding still felt very “us” and our guests were impressed with how seamless everything felt.
Find vendors you trust and your day will be easier
As two creatives, my husband and I have a lot of talented friends with unique skills. When planning our wedding, we turned to many of them for services that weren’t covered by the venue. We hired a trio led by my husband’s buddy to play our cocktail hour and first dance. My friend who designs jewelry created a tiara to match the heirloom necklace I wore and gave me dance lessons to help me stand and move confidently. Another friend who is a talented tailor altered both my wedding dress and my mother’s wedding dress for me to wear to the rehearsal dinner (and saved the day at the actual wedding; more on that below). Even our photographer was a friend of mine, which made getting photographed feel significantly less awkward. All of these moments felt so much more meaningful and we were excited to get to pay our buddies for their incredible and often under-valued skills.
Even if you don’t have a roster of artsy friends to call, finding vendors you trust can make a huge difference. I reached out to several different hair and makeup people but ultimately chose to work with the one who took the time to call me and discuss my vision for my wedding day. She also understood how to do makeup on my monolid eyes, something I’ve had botched by makeup artists in the past. A makeup trial allowed me to test the wear time of my look (it probably would have stayed in place for two days if I didn’t wash it off) and I was able to enjoy my wedding day feeling beautiful instead of worrying about how well my hair and makeup were holding up.
Vet your venue
At least in Tennessee, not all venues are welcoming to LGBTQ+ and non-Christian couples. If inclusivity is important to you, do your research before booking a venue. When looking at venues, my husband and I wanted to make sure that all of our guests would feel safe and welcome regardless of their orientation, gender identity, or faith practice; and, despite being in a heterosexual relationship, I’m not straight. My husband and I didn’t want to be married somewhere that would not have booked us if we didn’t present as straight.
HereComestheGuide.com has a pretty complete list that includes an “LGBTQ+ Friendly” tag, but directly checking the venue’s website is your best option. WeddingWire.com also has an “LGBTQ-Owned” filter.
Another important thing to look out for is handicap accessibility. I wanted to get married in the woods but my husband and I have several family members who would struggle on an uneven forest floor. Our venue had an outdoor, wooded ceremony area with a paved floor and a golf cart (decked out in flowers and ribbons) to shuttle guests who needed mobility assistance to and from the ceremony. It was the perfect way to get my dream location without inconveniencing or excluding important family members.
Zola is great but far from perfect
Several of my recently married friends spoke highly of Zola as a wedding planning tool. Zola is an online service that allows you to set up a wedding website, organize your guest list, share your registry, and even hire vendors. Almost all of these services are free because Zola really makes their money from 1) selling you paper goods like invites and thank you cards, 2) directly selling the goods on your registry, and 3) charging vendors when they book a client through the website. If I were to get married a second time (which will hopefully never happen), I would use Zola again but it does have some shortcomings.
First, the good things. It was amazing to have everything in one place. All of our guest management, including RSVPs, were accessible from our home page and we could easily track food preferences, gifts, and more. They even help you book hotel blocks. Their built-in registry and store meant we didn’t have to register at multiple stores and allowed us to ship gifts only when we were ready, convert them to cash if we changed our minds, and even create cash funds for a honeymoon or moving costs. It was easy to add products that weren’t sold by Zola to our registry meaning that, even if we were requesting something from another store, our guests could buy it with minimal effort. We were also able to order save-the-dates, invites, and thank-you cards (all with pre-addressed envelopes) that matched our website.
Now for the bad. Importing our guest list and addresses into Zola required several days of carefully reformatting a Google spreadsheet only for the website to scramble several names and addresses and drop parts of names that included accents. The trouble didn’t stop after importing. The pre-addressing system didn’t automatically resize addresses to fit on envelopes which meant I had to manually adjust and resize about 30% of the addresses. When the RSVPs started coming in, I discovered that I couldn’t sort or filter the list by response. Sending updated ceremony information to our guests who had RSVPed “yes” required more than an hour of carefully cross-checking every RSVP on our 200-person invite list against the addresses on the order page. It was so onerous that my husband opted to hand-address our thank-you cards. In addition, the hotel booking system was such a nightmare to navigate that not one of our guests opted to use it.
Despite these frustrations, I’d still say it’s worth using. Just lower your expectations if you work with data analysis or web design; Zola’s data management and website creation features are pretty underwhelming.
You don’t need a year to plan your wedding
Almost as soon as we were engaged, my fiancé and I started Googling wedding checklists and how-to articles. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the timelines we found were 18 or even 24 months long. I thought the “unconventional weddings” sites might have some shorter timelines but, no, even the sites targeting people having micro-weddings had 12 to 18-month planning periods.
Does taking over a year to plan your wedding help? Sure, especially if you’re on a tight budget. But is it necessary? Absolutely not. We successfully planned a wedding and got married in only eight months. The all-inclusive venue definitely helped with this but at no point did we feel pressed for time or rushed. The only caveat is that certain details require advanced booking and planning. For example, a made-to-order wedding dress can take 6 months to receive and alter. Some of these long timelines can be avoided by doing things like buying a dress on consignment or, in my case, a sample. But, if you’re determined to have a specific vendor or services that book out months in advance like hair and makeup, you may want to plan your timeline around those.
You can return your unused alcohol (and some places will even pick up your leftovers)
Our venue provided bartenders but not alcohol. My family can party and we purchased a lot of beer, wine, and liquor to ensure we didn’t run out before the night ended. Despite having an amazing time, our guests didn’t drink nearly as much as we expected. At the end of the night, we had more than half of the alcohol left over. We gifted the beer to the folks working at the venue and drove the rest back to Costco for a refund. In the end, we only paid for what we used and it cost significantly less than an open bar that’s priced per person.
If I had done more research, I would have purchased from a store that both delivered and picked up the leftovers from the venue. It was a hassle to drive back to Goodlettsville the morning after our wedding to retrieve my husband’s liquor-filled car. In the Nashville area, Red Spirits & Wine provides this service and, even if it cost more than Costco, the convenience would have justified the price.
Premarital counseling is great
Growing up in a Catholic family, I always assumed premarital counseling would be part of my marriage experience. Although I’m no longer practicing, premarital counseling still felt like a good idea, just with a licensed counselor rather than a priest.
My husband and I already had a very healthy relationship before seeing a couple’s therapist; counseling only deepened that. It improved our communication and gave us insights into one another we may have never had without the structure of a counseling session. We’ve enjoyed it enough to continue seeing our counselor as a preventative measure. It’s helped sort out issues as minor as the conflicting way we keep our calendars.
Even if you don’t think you would see any benefit from premarital counseling, it’s worth doing just for the discount on your marriage license. Whether you go to a therapist or a pastor, you can get $60 off your license with a completed form.
Your marriage license is the most important detail
There are many things you can forget or lose on your wedding day and still have everything run smoothly. Heck, you can even forget the rings and still technically get married. What you can’t forget is your marriage license. We have a whole article on getting a marriage license in Tennessee but here’s the short version: you need to get it BEFORE your wedding (up to 30 days in advance), you need to bring it to your wedding for your officiant to complete, and you need to bring it back to the county clerk within three business days of your marriage.
As is important when doing anything with the government, make sure you arrive prepared. Tennessee requires you to provide your parents’ names and the state they were born in, a photo ID, and proof of your social security number (a social security card, W2, or tax return all work). If you’ve been married before, you also need the date your divorce was finalized. My then-fiancé and I arrived at the County Clerk prepared and the whole process took less than 15 minutes.
The Monday after our wedding, I drove back to the County Clerk, handed over our officiated license, and waited for the clerk to prepare our certificate of marriage. The couple beside me were not as prepared. They were having a destination wedding in Nashville that had already been delayed by several days due to a missed flight. One partner had failed to bring any proof of their social security number and was frantically texting a friend back home to email them a copy of their W2. Meanwhile, the other partner had come better prepared but had been previously married. I didn’t get to hear whether or not they remembered the date of their divorce, but I crossed my fingers for them as I left.
At the end of the day, all that matters is that you’re married
Our day went as smoothly as we could have hoped… except for a complete dress disaster just before the ceremony. I could feel my friend struggling to zip up my dress even before she waved over a second person to try the zipper. Before I knew it, every woman in the room was fussing with my zipper. Long story short, the zip got stuck at the top but pulled apart from top to bottom meaning I was trapped in the dress with an unintended keyhole back that extended all the way down to my butt. Luckily, the woman who tailored my dress was both a friend and a wedding guest. She rolled up with a travel sewing machine, cut me out of the dress with a razor, and sewed a new zipper in just twenty minutes.
As I sat, first trapped in my busted dress and then in my PJs while Jessica worked her sewing magic, everyone around me panicked but I was completely calm. My dad, who was clearly anxious as he waited to walk me down the aisle, asked how I wasn’t freaking out. First, I knew they couldn’t start the ceremony without me so it wasn’t like I was going to miss the wedding. Second, I had complete trust in my tailor friend; I knew that, even if she had to sew me in, she would find a way to get me into that dress. And thirdly, and most importantly, all that mattered was that I ended the day married to the love of my life.
I could have walked down the aisle in my pajamas, the power could have gone out at the reception, or it could have started pouring rain and it wouldn’t have mattered. The glamour and the fun of a wedding are wonderful but they aren’t what’s truly important. What is important is that you’re marrying the person you love surrounded by whichever people you want to share that moment with.
In Summary (the TL;DR)
Learning from the successes and failures of other brides made my planning my wedding just a little bit easier. Now, I’m offering up my own wins and losses in the hope that it can make your wedding day go a little bit smoother. Below, I’ve summed up what I wish I knew into a quick list that you can tack on to whatever more comprehensive checklist you’re using.
Make a joint email account before creating a Zola account or contacting vendors
Bridal parties can make your life a lot easier
All-inclusive venues are a great option for couples looking to minimize planning
Take the time to find vendors you trust
Double-check that your venue is welcoming to all of your guests regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs and can accommodate their mobility needs
Take advantage of free services like Zola but temper your expectations
You can successfully plan a wedding - even a large one - in less than a year
Look into purchasing your alcohol from a company that will pick up any leftover booze from the venue
Premarital counseling is helpful for even healthy relationships and can save you money on your marriage license
Your marriage license is the most important detail of your wedding
All that matters is that you get married to the person you love
Ready to tie the knot?
If you’re ready to make that joint email account, you’re going to need an officiant to make your marriage legal. Whether you’re planning a simple elopement or a grand event, Zelda can make your union official. Reach out to book your wedding today or explore the Services and Prices page for an in-depth look at how Zelda makes your special day that little bit more special.
