GUIDE TO WEDDING PLANNING & WELLNESS
Welcome from Meredith and Andrew, the husband and wife team behind Love & Lavender and creators of this wellness guide!
Wedding planning doesn’t have to be complicated. Nor does it need to be a stress-induced excercise that keeps you awake at night.
Yet, our experience tells us that with so many different personalities types, opinions, and expectations involved the whole process can quickly go from Royal Wedding Bliss to A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Who is this guide for?
- Newly engaged couples who don’t know where to start in the wedding planning journey
- Those who desire a smooth, happy, and healthy engagement period
- Those who want the least amount of wedding day stress!
Why a Wedding Wellness Guide?
The topic really resonates with us, especially after our own stressed filled wedding planning period. We’ve been blogging on Love & Lavender for over 4 years now, and thought it was about time to give back in a more meaningful way.
The engagement timeframe leading up to your wedding day is supposed to be one of the happiest and best times in life. After all, that is what we’re all lead to believe from our parents, mainstream media, and the wedding industry as a whole. For the most part, wedding planning and the wedding day are amazing!
But here is the realist in us coming out: Don’t you get the feeling that there is an overwhelming amount of energy directed at (taking as much money from the bride and groom) the bride and groom?
Not all comes up rainbows and kittens in the land of fairytale happily-ever-afters. Read most wedding blogs, magazines, or attend a bridal show and you’ll certainly experience a high amount of positivity. After a while it becomes painfully obvious that such a hightened state of bliss is masking something deaper. There is a boogeyman lurking in the wedding planning shadows that not many are open to discussing — a boogeyman whose name is STRESS!
Survey Says
A recent survey asked 500 engaged couples about their wedding planning stress levels. It is the type of survey that really opened our eyes. It told us that there is indeed a huge stress mess around weddings in general.
A few results from that survey:
- 96% of respondents find wedding planning stressful
- 40% of respondents specifically used the terms “very” and extremely” to describe wedding planning stress.
- 86% of respondents suffered on average 3+ stress-induced symptoms, including skin breakouts, hair loss, loss of sex drive, insomnia, headaches
Love & Lavender’s own wedding week was far from the calm oasis of wellness that many envision. It included bouts of acute and excessive stress during our 16 month engagement. Stress-induced symptoms like trench mouth — look it up and you’ll agree that no bride should have to endure excessive stress levels.
After reviewing the numbers from the survey above and spending many hours discussing the results, we realized wedding stress is common. We think it is totally rediculous that 86% of couples beginning a new life together are brought to unnecessary levels of stress.
In writing this guide, we want to create a complete guide designed to make your planning process relatively painless. A simple wedding planning checklist is great and all (you can get that here), but we thought brides and grooms deserve more.
That’s why we strive to give you a full fledged roadmap through the wedding planning journey. Sure, you could search online and get 5 different answers, each with their own agenda and possibly without listed sources. You need the right answers from an impartial source. Who has time to check and verify sources when they’re wedding planning?!
Love & Lavender is a small wedding media company that aims to give you the best advice for your situation from authoritative sources.
As we release new chapters of this guide, we hope to encapsulate every major section of the entire wedding planning process such as the engagement, budgeting and finances, the ceremony, and all the nitty gritty details you might not think about.
It is vitally important to touch on wedding topics that aren’t discussed in great detail. Much of what you read in the wedding media is painted with a swoon-worthy over-the-top rainbows and unicorns brush.
We love inspirational wedding ideas and topics as much as the next person, and provide a lot of it on the blog. However, we also want to be realistic and give newly engaged couples as much valuable advice as we can.
After all, life does continue past your wedding day. If you haven’t managed the process properly in terms of personal or relationship stress, you may be left with a massive emotional/financial hangover post wedding.
Among other things, this guide will show you where the key ignition points of stress can creep in during wedding planning, as well as discuss all the emotional highs and lows that wedding seems to bring on.
Wedding Wellness Guarantee?
Not exactly. No two situations are the same, and there are no guarantees when it comes to dealing with other human beings — especially in a wedding context. However, armed with the right tools, frameworks, and information, you stand a better chance to navigate around those roadblocks loved one may put up.
Our hope is that you enjoy a harmonious engagement period and wedding day, one that allows you to manage any little stress that may arise in a healthy way.
This guide is for every couple planning their wedding, no matter what budget.
How to Use this Guide
It’s up to you how you proceed. Read chapter by chapter, or pick and choose a specific topic that you need help with. We know that many readers won’t be skimming this massive guide from start to finish.
We speak from our personal wedding planning experience, along with the thousands of real weddings we’ve published here on the blog. Learning and engaging with hundreds of brides over the years puts us in a unique position to distill information and give actionable advice. In addition, we will be reaching out to authoritative experts in the wedding field to further add value to the guide.
Whatever wedding related issues your’re struggling with currently, we want to help you as best we can. We hope you’ll join our Love & Lavender Wedding Wellness community and take a bit of the stress out of planning your wedding!
