Mike and Amy made a trip to Palm Springs a few years before they got engaged, and fell in love with it the mid-century architecture, the colours and the heat. They were pretty certain that they wanted to get married there, so once they committed to that, they leaned on that style to guide them!
“Initially when we were going over their style/theme it seemed very classic to me,” the bride explained, “but as we tried to find thing it became clear that our style/colour palette was not what most people were going for.” Once they hired their wedding planner, things began to fall into place. “Trust the professionals,” Amy advises, “as they live and breathe for weddings, more likely than not they will have a simple answer, or ideas that will help you make a decision on something that has been slowing you down!”
One morning in 2016, Allison and Tara saw a segment on the Today show about a new company that planned surprise vacations; ‘we looked at each other and at the same time Tara said “I would NEVER do that!” Allison said, “I would TOTALLY do that!”… and so, they booked their first trip for Valentine’s 2017.
“For us, love is about feeling safe to venture outside of your comfort zone,” the couple told us, “also how cool is it to have someone else do all the planning and neither of you have to be on the hook if the accommodations or destination don’t turn out right?!” The pair have used the Pack Up and Go experience as a tradition for Valentine’s day ever since. Fast forward to discussions about wedding planning, and neither of them had any interest in a formal affair.
Kate Forsyth of Good Day Club is here today with your guide to staying sane and – shock horror – actually having fun while planning your wedding and choosing your dress.
Why does getting married have to happen to a nice person like me?” she asked me. After I finished laughing, I commenced serious contemplation of how wedding planning can be quite so brutal and not that fun for everyone. I, like a lot of wedding industry people, am bang up for all things to do with weddings, but for some it literally ruins their previously happy lives with stress and other people’s expectations and budget blow outs and decision fatigue and whether you have to invite your mother’s second cousin by marriage and adoption.
Having married twice (you may call me Elizabeth Taylor; though I am quite into husband #2, so there is a chance I won’t make it to eight) and worked in the wedding industry for a few years now, I’ve seen and heard it all. May my musings below assist brides everywhere to have a bangin’ fun time during the fiancé phase and skip some of the life sapping and definitely avoidable nonsense.
How exactly does one remain sane while being engaged?
Include a hefty line item in your budget for psychiatrists, psychologists, massages and heroin. If that is not a possibility then I suggest you and the fiancé set yourselves some priorities. What is important to you both for this pretty monumental time in your lives? What sort of engagement do you want to have and what sort of wedding suits you?
That way, when you start to get into the wedding worm hole, wondering if you should release doves or butterflies, you can donk yourself on the noggin and remember that your priority is a relaxed indoor urban wedding, and thus the pigeons, oops I mean doves, will get all disoriented and poop on your guests. And getting pooped on does not make for relaxed guests.
After having a huge festival style barn wedding planned last year, Jenny and Ryan decided after a few failed attempts to just elope to Glencoe with just the bride’s mum and sister present.
Their day was held at St Mary’s, a former chapel now turned recording studio and wedding space that oozes eclectic, bohemian style. Set overlooking a dreamy river and unreal mountains. “We feel like we planned so many forms of a wedding that this seemed so easy and relaxed in comparison,” the bride told us. “We wanted to make all the choices we did not have the opportunity to had we had a big wedding, and make it about all the things we loved. I guess you could say the inspiration was us.”
Having been married before, Lauren know she wanted a small and intimate wedding this time where they could really spend the whole day together in their favourite place and not be running around stressed out. So when her and fiancé Tom decided to get married in 2020, COVID restrictions helped along with this. They chose their favourite national park, Yosemite, for their celebration and hired 3 cabins for them and their 10 guests to really enjoy their time together leading up to the wedding.
“The simplistic and family-centric vibe of our wedding made it quite unique,” Lauren told us, “I also wore all of my family heirlooms – I had my grandmother’s first wedding dress altered by my best friend, my headpiece was my great-grandmother’s necklace turned into a necklace and my sapphire necklace was my Mother-in-law’s.”
When the groom is a magician and the bride a comedian, you know their wedding day is bound to be packed with entertainment! In fact there wasn’t a dull moment in Robyn and Martin’s October wedding day, with musicians, magicians, singing waiters, a flashmob and a first dance to Baby Shark! “We just wanted a day full of fun,” the bride told us,
“I’ve been to so many weddings and had hours of making polite conversation and twiddling my thumbs that I was adamant ours would be the opposite. If a family like ours can’t put on a show then who can!”
Their day was held at Tilehouse Street Baptist Church in Hitchin before moving on to the Hilton Garden Inn in Luton for the reception. The bride and her mum did tonnes of DIY, spending months in the lead making props and doing almost everything themselves with the help of family, bridesmaids, children and anyone else they could lay their hands on! From custom wine-glass charms as place names to handmade favour boxes, birdcage centre-pieces to a life-size tardis for the couple to secretly make their entrance from for the reception! “I probably took on too much,” the bride admitted, “and should have delegated a lot more but I was so secretive about all the little details that it paid off to do it all myself!”
👰 
