My wedding is coming up in about 2 1/2 weeks. This year I was hired to do a job quite different than even what I went to school for (with the added bonus of having to take extra classes to fulfill the certification requirements), but I'm still teaching at the same school. I've been given the chess club and the academic team. I'm one of the teachers over the Student Council Association, and we have homecoming week next week (complete with community night, street dance, pep rally, grade level games, and homecoming queen halftime) to organize. I have a mother and sister with seriously Type A personalities involved.

So, when people talk to me, knowing all this, they kind of give me this pitiful smile. My supervisor tells me not to worry about a thing. She knows I just have so much going on with the wedding. People ask me if I'm a basket case about the wedding, and when I smile and say, "No, I'm doing okay. I might be nervous the day of, though," I get looked at as if I suddenly have grown four baby alien heads out of my shoulder. Then I get told to "just wait."

The thing is, I have been waiting, for a long time. It's like a hammer that's going to drop any minute. Even my super cool, super chill best friend got a little crazy in the last few months, but I feel about as stressed out about the wedding as a Hindu cow chewing cud in India. And it's not like it's a small, casual wedding. That's really not possible when you have a family as large as mine, but honestly, I've just had fun doing the work that has went into it so far. Still, I'm wondering if I should be stressed, or if three days before the wedding I'm suddenly going to become some raging bridal monster from the depths of TheKnot's H**l.

Has anyone else had a decently sized, stress-free wedding? Out of curiosity, I've googled about it, and all I can find is advice to upcoming and neurotic brides on accepting that it's going to stressful and how not to develop some kind of tic or trichotillomania. It's a little disturbing.

I don't get the culture of winding yourself up for a wedding with all the pressure of turning it into "The Bride's Perfect Day". It's stupid. It's supposed to be a big party celebrating love, uniting two people and families, it should be something you look forward to with joyful anticipation and happy butterflies, not a make or break ritual that if anything is less than perfect the day is ruined. Humans are imperfect beings living imperfect lives, nd the odds of having a planned perfect day are right up there with having a planned perfect orgasm.

Realistically, on the scale of important stuff in your life the marriage is big, the wedding is small potatoes. It's right up there with having a baby, especially your first. When you're pregnant with your first the L&D turns into this shadow looming in the future and it consumes your thoughts. Fortunately, for the majority of women, the birth itself is a mere blip on the radar of motherhood.

IOW, I think Bridezillas are freaks just leaving themselves open for potential massive disappointment. Having a solid outline with room left for variation will probably lead to a better experience, seriously. It's usually the spontaneous and unexpected that make a perfect experience.

Nope. I think it shows that you are focused on what a wedding is supposed to be about, marrying the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. I agree with ReNew Me.

I feel bad for brides that turn their wedding day into a performance, and make it about the "show" rather than the coming together of two people. That requires no grand event. If two people are truly marrying for the right reasons, they will be so focused on each other that they won't care about what else happens.

My DH and I started dating 14 years ago, we moved in together after 4 month, engaged 4 years later and married 2 after that, and have now been married for 8 years at the end of Sept. We are still inseparable. We can spend the whole day doing nothing and just talking and hanging out. And bedroom time, while strained at times with 3 kids and now my pregnancy exhaustion was still good, henceforth the surprise baby lol...

Anyway, I was more stressed about job interviews than my wedding. No matter what happened, I was focused on getting married, the rest was just there. Actually, when we went to the church, we were supposed to start at something o'clock (I forget now), I think the wedding started at 10am? Lets say 10a (might have been 11a...) anyway my dad's car broke down on the way to the church and he was about 20 minutes late. The priest or church lady (I was raised catholic, but this was a Baptist church, you get the drift) was freaking out. My dad showed up and I was more worried about what happened (he has no cell phone, only person I know with no cell) so I thought he was in an accident or something. He literally took about 30 second to tell me and she tried rushing us along. I asked her if she had another wedding...no, she was just concerned about being on time. Finally I was like "chill out and go away. We'll be in in a minute and if any of the guest have a problem with waiting, they can leave." Of course everyone was fine with it.

We did what we wanted whether it was tradition or not. We didn't have a wedding party, just two best men, which were very close friends of DH and I. They both gave a toast. DH and I didn't drink any alcohol, so I have some water for the toast. We didn't drink then, so we just did what we normally do. (Now we enjoy the occasional wine, but that's all)

I wore minimal makeup that I did myself, and left my hair down, but put it in a ponytail at the reception. The reception was at a restaurant. No open bar. It was lunch time. We did our own music with several mixed CDs and our own music system we brought. No YMCA or whatever else. Just what we thought was nice. There were some little things I cant remember that people would say "oh you are supposed to do this or people usually do that"...and we didn't do it if we didn't want to. This isn't for other people, its for the couple. And its not for the couple or bride to say LOOK AT ME!!!! Its to let others share with you a very special moment in your life.

I think you not being nervous shows your well grounded on what marriage is about and what a wedding really means.

Renew me made a great point about having a baby. Too many moms, especially first time have BIG plans for the birth, likes its an event that needs all this planning and staging. And they get nervous that their plans will not be followed through. Its going to happen without planning. Just like marriage and love. If its real, its going to be perfect even if all the "plans" fall apart, it was never about the plans to begin with.

Congrats on your upcoming marriage!

Good post. And yes, the wedding day and childbirth is small potatoes.

I'm getting married for the 2nd time the week of Thanksgiving and I'm not nervous at all either. I'm scared of flying there (destination wedding) but not nervous about the wedding, or marriage.

When people say "just wait" it's because they're married and miserable. Ignore the haters, and women that are Bridezillas are NUTS.

Congrats.

I don't know that I would call my wedding BIG or anything. There were maybe 200 total guests between the ceremony and the reception (some people couldn't make the ceremony, and could only attend the reception and vice versa)... but I was completely calm through all of it. My bridesmaids were more stressed than I was. My mother in law was trying to make it her wedding and was snippy with me the whole time because of the date I chose.

I enjoyed the planning, and the budgeting, and knowing I was about to marry the most amazing guy who I never thought I would find. The day of the wedding, we ended up running late getting to the church to get ready, my friends freaked out... I was was pretty much like "whatever... I'm the bride, it'll start when I'm ready, and not before".

We got to the church, and my flowers showed up... and they were the wrong color. Pink instead of purple. No biggie, they were still pretty, no effect on the event at all. My accents were royal purple and lavender. The hot magenta flowers worked okay... Then we were getting ready, and my hair refused to curl, and my friend who was working on hair freaked out because she didn't get to have her hair done. Which is about the only thing that irritated me, since she was trying to be the star of my wedding. Meh. My maid of honor forgot to get her dress hemmed, so it was too long.

Walked down the aisle 6 minutes after the scheduled start time. Pastor doing the ceremony TOTALLY skipped over the hymn that was supposed to be sang (something that was important to my husband). The rest of the ceremony went fairly well, until the end, when I was supposed take my flowers and forgot. Then after the ceremony noticed that in the bulletin for the ceremony, they'd listed my parents under "parents of the groom" and hubby's parents under "parents of the bride."

And at the end of it all, I was insanely happy and didn't care about a single one of those goofs, because ultimately we were pronounced husband and wife and that's all that mattered.

I don't think you're a freak at all... Unless I'm a freak, too.

(if you want to see one of my favorite pictures, it's on my full profile)

Thank you all so much! That makes me feel a little better. I don't really know what to say when people talk to me like I must be an insane person at this point, as if a woman begins frothing at the mouth and howling at the moon during the wedding process.

We did have a bit of a slip up last night. The band that was supposed to play called and bailed on us. My fiancé is in the local music scene, so hopefully we can find a replacement, but if not, I guess we'll just plug up a playlist. That was a little disappointing because the band is quite good and supposed to be my fiancé's buddies. I was looking forward to having them play.

I've not had many years of experience in life, but I've found this to be pretty true. I'm so idealistic sometimes, so over the years, I've had to learn that the ideal I can conjure up in my head will always be more perfect than my actual experiences. I'm anticipating the wedding to be fun. I mean, family and friends, a pretty dress, cake, and music... It's kind of hard to go wrong as long as those things are there.

The fiancé and I have been very careful to stick with our guns on this. We're doing a first look before the wedding, which everyone has been absolutely appalled by, but we think is perfect. Neither of us can act naturally in front of a crowd, and it's important for us to have a moment of quiet together before the ceremony. Our ceremony is largely secular, with a few mentions of God. Neither of us are necessarily religious, but spiritual in our own ways, so we basically rewrote the heavily religious sections of the ceremony that our awesome PhD theologian officiant sent us, and he loves the new copy. I'm expecting quite a bit of opinions on that from my religious family. My mother and father already pushed very hard for us to get married in a church, which we flat out refused.

This is how I feel. I mean, I've planned a lot of things for how I want them to go, but I'm not going to drive myself insane with the thought of something going wrong. I just want to get married, have fun, and then go on the honeymoon!

My best friend was the same way about her wedding! I kept asking her, you must be nervous? Stressed? Something???? Granted, she had it at a venue that took care of EVERYTHING for her, so once it was planned and the flowers and food and invitations were picked, she was done! And you know what, we all enjoyed the **** out of that stress-free, drama-free wedding. So while you may feel like an odd duck for not being stressed, embrace it. Overthinking it will probably just make you stressed! haha However, it does sound like you have a lot on your plate! I hope you have some time to relax before the wedding.

A few nerves the day of are probably normal though

I always felt bridezillas were more fiction than anything. Something reality T.V. created to make people fear the bride and to create unnecessary drama. Granted, there are probably some women out there that freak out over things, but I feel that these would be more the minority, not the majority. My friends (mostly the male ones) have decided the moment a woman gets a little stressed or has an emotional tear or says something simple like "I'm worried the dress won't fit" suddenly it's OH WHOA! BRIDEZILLA over here! I've also discovered people like to add stereotypes to something and then find a reason to apply it to real life people. Not to say there aren't the occasional women who are overly picky, but the extremes you hear about, has anyone ever witnessed in real life? It's like the mythical extreme feminist that berates men for opening the door for her, sure a few may exist in the world, but that vast majority don't freak out the moment someone holds the door open, most might actually appreciate the gesture and in return hold the door open for anyone behind them.

I'm off track.

Regarding the wedding, I think most big events bring some form of stress. Maybe you were expecting extreme panic mode while putting on some big show, but I think most weddings the stress is "Will Grandma be able to make the flight? She's been sick a lot lately..." or "I hope none of my guests are allergic to shell fish, should I have not ordered this?" It's just small things because you realize while it's your day to celebrate, you're also somewhat responsible for the safety and health of your guests and you want them to celebrate with you, not have a miserable time because they got food poisoning.

Planning events, especially for people that never have before, can be stressful. It's a lot of organizing, budgeting, and coming up with ideas. You don't realize how much can go into it until you start to roll up your sleeves and get to work. At first it may seem easy, but then it's like "Oh yeah... I also need a marriage license, I have no idea how to do that... need to google," Then the next day "Oh yeah... I'm suppose to have a bouquet, crap... how much do those cost and how soon do I need to order?" The more organized a person is, as well as how much support and help they get makes this a lot easier and lowers stress. Someone that has experience planning and preparing and has a lot of time as well as help from friends and family, probably won't be near as stressed as someone that has never planned anything bigger than what she was going to have for dinner and didn't even know how to order from a caterer nor what prices would be.

Stress on your wedding day, doesn't suddenly lessen the love you have or the happiness you will feel. It makes you just as human as the person that doesn't feel any stress and is confident that if the priest forgets to show up she could just improvise, she's ready for the worse and doesn't care what could go wrong, as long as she's happy and her guests are having a good time, either with a DJ or an iPod shuffle plugged into the car stereo trying to fill the backyard with music.

If you feel no stress, that's awesome. But if you do start to feel just a small amount, that's also fine. We're human. And sure, some people feel it needs to be more perfect than others, but I wouldn't berate these women. Everyone enjoys life differently, some just want to go to the party, while others are excited to throw the perfect party. I think it's wrong for anyone to judge someone else's marriage just because the wedding was stress free or stress induced. People handle things differently.

I'm getting married next year, so far no stress. Just making lists, budgets and picked a Venue. Getting ready to order and send invitations. Maybe as it gets closer I'll start to feel more heat, currently, I think it's going to be a blast. I've also had a ton of experience with event planning and my Fiance is awesome sauce and helps out while I'm studying for CPA exams. The "just wait" people may have felt the way we do now, currently content and happy to get married, acknowledging the wedding is coming up, but not worried about it, (more excited!), but these people may be cynical or also acknowledge that small things (like a dad's car breaking down) can cause stress in their own ways.

Congrats on the wedding! I'm glad so far there isn't much stress and hope it continues to be that way.

This is why I seriously considered a wedding planner. Someone to take care of all the gritty details while I just get to pick colors.

But, I thoroughly enjoy planning events. So I'm looking forward to it!

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
You look so happy in that picture.