After Andrew proposed, I made some blithe comment about not worrying about our wedding until my sister got married in September, 5 months later.
Clearly I am delusional.
I must have been suffering from temporary insanity, or the kind of total lack of self-knowledge that turns people into hypocrites. You see, I would like to be the kind of person who is totally calm and clear-headed about wedding planning. I don’t want to turn into the type of crazy woman who turns a deranged eye to the cameras on “Bridezillas” screaming, “It’s MYYYYYYY DAY!!” I hate those people. And I will try to avoid that level of crazy.
The fact remains, however, that I am an event planner by trade, and it would be extremely out-of-character for me to let an exciting event like a wedding go unplanned for nearly HALF a YEAR. So no cool, calm and collected for me. I jumped into wedding planning feet-first, ordering books, buying magazines, and reading the internet.
I realized something quickly though. I have not really been a person who has always known exactly what I want for my wedding. I could see us getting married in all different venues, times of year, and with all different sizes of wedding. I realized the hardest part of planning a wedding was picking which wedding to plan. (Well, and paying for it.)
Andrew was no help! He says he planned the proposal (and, let’s face it, it was awesome), so I was in charge of the wedding. I suspected that as time passed, there would be some things that we would all be surprised that Andrew had an opinion on, but until he was faced with a specific choice, he didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted either.
So I’ve planned 5 weddings, one after the other, abandoning each until we finally found the right one. Not technically planned all the way through, have to go cancel contracts with vendors level of planning. But you know what I mean, right?
And I could have gone through with each and every one of these weddings, but for one or two missing elements. Most often, it was striking the right balance of budget to number of people invited.
Let’s say that Andrew and I figured that our budget was $25,000 (not our actual budget, but close to the Knot’s average amount spent on weddings. And, well, pretty close to our budget too.) We realized that that would get us a really nice wedding with 30 guests in Scotland to a relaxed party for more that 200 in Texas. And we couldn’t make up our minds about which we wanted.
So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share some of the weddings I planned. Maybe someone else can use the information to actually have one of the weddings of my dreams!
Courtney Hoyt 
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