If you hire a good planner, this is all you should have to think about on your wedding day. Photo by MWD Photography.
I’ve written a lot about do-it-yourself weddings lately, and here are my final thoughts (probably) on the subject. Should you plan and manage your wedding yourself? Yes–and no.
Most people can do much of the planning themselves. Hiring vendors is not difficult. You will probably also want to plan the decor yourself so that it reflects your taste. Of course, if you’d rather not handle all the details yourself, by all means, hire a full-service wedding planner!
The place where a lot of people get stuck in the planning process is scheduling the wedding day and the logistics of making everything happen. It turns out that these are special skills. And so you will likely want to have a professional planner on hand. One of my favorite parts of this job is taking a tangled mass of good ideas and turning it into a usable plan. Actually, I really like seeing the smile of relief on my clients’ faces when I do that.
Even if you are able to do the scheduling and logistics yourself, actually managing what happens on your wedding day is another matter. I like to use a theatre metaphor to describe it: You are the star of the show; you can also be the director and the producer. But you need a good stage manager to make sure that you shine. Also, on the day of your wedding, you should be able to focus on getting married, not on whether the flowers are delivered on time.
This might be predictable coming from me, but I have seen enough problems and near-disasters to know that it really does make a difference: Make sure you have someone with practical, hands-on experience managing your wedding day. Don’t try to do it yourself.
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