The sheer volume of decisions to be made and details to be carried through with can be overwhelming as you plan your wedding. Often, particularly if you’re not a great detail person, this can cause stress. If your partner is on a different wave-length than you on the wedding planning, the stress can escalate.
One of the things we often do in this situation is to put our heads down and bull through to the other side. We know nothing, we feel nothing, we get the tasks completed. This is dangerous. This is your wedding. You want to be present to the process of planning for your wedding and your marriage. This is your life. It’s not just “a short period and then it will be different.” It’s going to set patterns for the rest of your life together.
It only takes 3 weeks to create a good habit. It takes exactly the same amount of time to start a bad one. You want to be in your feelings (that would be your real feelings, not your anxiety-induced feelings!) as you plan for your wedding. You don’t want to shut down. You want to experience each wonderful moment in the lead up to your wedding. You want to anticipate your marriage in a good way!
If your feelings are resentment and irritation that your partner isn’t doing things that are moving the process along, you need to deal with those feelings (and not always with your partner.) If your feelings are resentment and irritation that your partner is worrying about what feel like ridiculous details to you, same caveats apply.
Sharing your feelings is part of what marriage entails. To do that, you need to know what they are. Don’t have a lot of practice with this? Many of us grew up in homes where feelings weren’t appreciated. Keep testing. What do I feel now about this? Don’t intellectualize. Don’t justify, just figure out what you feel. When you can’t feel those things, trace back to when you shut down. What were you feeling then? If this is a common pattern, you may want to find a counselor and figure out how to get through it.
Neither you nor your sweetie beloved should be riding roughshod over your feelings. You want to enjoy your wedding planning process. To do that you have to design a planning process you’ll enjoy participating in. To do that you need to know what you’re feeling. It’s going to make a much better planning process, a much more enjoyable wedding ceremony and reception, and a much stronger marriage. This is important enough that you should make promises about it in your wedding vows. And then you should live into those promises. You get extra points for practicing your wedding vows beforehand! Your marriage will be better for it!
Bottom Line?: Give your relationship the chance it deserves to succeed wildly, against all odds! After all, you deserve it. Your relationship deserves it! There’s a lot more info to help you create the wedding ceremony of your dreams, the wedding vows of your heart and the marriage of a lifetime over on my website: http://annkeelerevans.org And to help you create the wedding vows that will become the blueprint for your incredible, happily and healthily ever-after marriage, I’d like to invite you to sign up to receive 2 free wedding vow templates: http://annkeelerevans.org/weddings/free Go on! I dare you, be happy together!
