5 Lessons I Learned from a Week's Worth of Wedding Planning

I and my husband just tied the knot last March, and I got to admit, it was one heck of a ride. I was extremely busy the entire month: I just came back from my first academic conference abroad, I was in charge of two major events at work, and I had a host of graduate school requirements to finish. With all the hullabaloo that was going on, I barely had time to prepare for the wedding, and just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I suffered a horrible asthma attack that made me unproductive for an entire week—the week before the big day, to be exact.

I found it ironic that I was able to organize two events for work within a limited amount of time but was clueless when it came to the wedding. It didn’t help that I had a particular image of how it would go in my head, and I felt compelled that everything should go exactly just how I pictured it: magical, romantic, and unique. Of course, I didn’t have the nitty-gritty details on how to achieve those abstractions; all I knew was that I want all three qualities present during my wedding, bar none.

With such high and terribly vague standards, I pressured myself to prepare for a perfect wedding. I told myself that my self-imposed ideals called for nothing less than 100 percent of my time, so I didn’t make any preparations until all my my work and school-related obligations were done. The thing is, my schedule for the entire month of March was jam-packed: I had events for March 7 and 11, and my final exam for statistics class (a subject that I grappled with for the entire second semester) was scheduled on March 23. It didn't help that I had other work and school responsibilities that also needed my attention. To make things more interesting, I had a recurring flu during the entire ordeal, which eventually morphed into a really bad asthma attack by March 12.

I was set to walk down the aisle on March 23, and I was a complete mess.

Looking back, I didn’t know how I was able to do everything. Papers were submitted, the events commenced without any drama, and a wedding venue was finally secured. The details only emerged a week before the actual ceremony, but much to my surprise, everything fell into place, sans the bridezilla planning that I initially thought was a requirement for every wedding.

While I wouldn’t recommend that anybody go through the roller coaster ride that I went through, it’s reassuring to know that there’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to wedding planning. In fact, you can only have a couple of days to iron out everything, and still get the wedding you’ve always wanted. Mine took a couple of crazy turns before it actually took place, but it still turned out according to what I originally envisioned: magical, romantic, and unique. Here are the 5 things that helped make my dream wedding a reality:

(Photo by Jaymee Gamil)