Not quite 27 dresses, but I have worn plenty of formal wear in my adult life.
In the past three years, I have attended 15 weddings — as a member of the bridal party in eight of them. I’ve been a bridesmaid, a maid of honor, a ceremony speaker and officiant, and this April I was the bride.
Having both seen and experienced all the emotions weddings stir up –– the love, joy, overload, conflict and dread –– here is what I have learned about having a great wedding.
It’s the guest’s job to have fun
I was sitting with one of my friends in her frenzy to finish the final details two days before her wedding when she stopped all of a sudden. Her eyes were wide as a terrible thought struck her.
“What if I am doing all this work, and no one even has any fun?” she said.
We talked it through and came to this conclusion: Her guests were going to be provided food, drinks, good music and great company. If they couldn’t find a way to have a good time, that was on them.
Yes, it is fun to put together all the details and extras, and some consideration of their comfort can go a long way for your guests’ experience. But if a plated dinner or buffet, bespoke stationery or something found online, full-on light show or one disco ball is going to make or break how much fun they have, they really don’t know how to have a good time.
My husband — I still love saying that — isn’t so excited to be on a dance floor, but he knows that our jobs are to keep the energy up when we go to a wedding. That may mean that I leave him to have great conversations with the couple’s family while I keep the bridal party dancing.
And when the dance floor is feeling sparse, you’d better believe he is out there with me, dancing to “September,” “Uptown Funk” and “Don’t Stop Believing.”
You know you have done your job as a guest when, in the debriefs in the following days, the couple says, “I think everyone really had a good time, don’t you?”
Make the day special for you by making it special for them
Yes, it is their day. The couple is absolutely the priority.
That being said, it makes sense that the wedding of a friend or family member is also an important day in your own life.
I remember standing up to give the maid of honor speech at the wedding of my best friend since infancy and my hands started shaking. I was already a good way through and wasn’t feeling stage fright so much anymore, so I didn’t know why I was reacting so visibly.
I paused, looked around, and realized that part of my daydreams of the future included us being each other’s maid of honor. I had spent 27 years knowing this day would come, and there we were. It was about them, but a day in which I got to support her, stand beside her, and speak about how important she was to me was a smaller milestone in my own life.
That day meant so much to me, but it still wasn’t about me.
If the reason the day is important to you is that you feel close to the couple, prioritize your acting out your closeness with the couple rather than looking for ways to be treated as a VIP.
Having been to so many weddings, I can say that I can tell who the couple’s closest people are by who they go to for support –– not who they cater to.
Every wedding I have been part of has one, or a few, people about whom the couple sighs deeply. We can’t seat Uncle Joe too far away or he will say that we don’t care about him. If we don’t use the cake cutter my grandmother bought us, she will throw a fit. My dad will get mad if we don’t invite his whole office.
A lot of the desires behind those requests are people wanting to be included and feel conntected to the couple. But it should not be about what I’m asking for as a guest. I feel closest to my people when I am up all night helping make a last-minute flower arrangement or taking the less ideal time in the makeup chair so a more sensitive guest could have the spot they wanted.
It isn’t about being a pushover, but it is about being the person with whom they can share the difficult load of planning a wedding. It’s knowing that your relationship is close enough that they don’t have to tiptoe around you.
When I do that, I will get those thank-you glances throughout the night, or the couple and I will dance together a little more exuberantly. That is the best way to celebrate your closeness with the people getting married.
Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst
Everyone has at least one wild card in their family or on their mandatory guest list, and even if it isn’t a person, it might be a dynamic.
Friends of yours are seeing one another for the first time after a nasty breakup; a family member means well but always says the wrong thing at the wrong time; or maybe it’s someone who is going to demand too much from the couple and make things difficult for them.
The best weddings I have been part of hoped for the best and planned for the worst.
The core members –– the couple and their closest confidants –– got really explicit about where the potential sticky situations were and made plans for how to be proactive to avoid them. Then polite and loving conversations were had with the people involved.
“Mom, I know you and Aunt Jane aren’t on good terms right now, but I’d really like everyone to enjoy the wedding day. I have planned to seat you at separate tables during dinner. Is there anything else we can do so that you both can interact pleasantly?”
In the weddings I participated in, many of the people actually stepped up and collaborated to make the wedding a beautiful day, and all the precautions were never utilized.
But sometimes it doesn’t go that way. Just in case, it’s helpful to have people –– whether that is family, friends, wedding staff or even a security guard –– prepped on how you’d like them to handle potential conflicts.
Things might still go wrong — big things or things you could never plan for. (One family member of mine had their venue destroyed by an unprecedented storm the morning of their wedding.) But a little foresight can go a long way.
Have a wedding for the both of you
My husband and I had exactly the wedding we wanted. Sure, decorations broke that morning and little hiccups changed some of the plans, but we had talked about what we cared about early on and made sure those things happened.
We wanted it to feel like us. I knew we didn’t have the budget or the personalities for an ultra-chic, magazine-worthy event, but we made the details ours.
The venue was covered in my vintage finds, the menu reflected my husband’s memories growing up crabbing at his grandparents’ house, and one of my childhood best friends performed the ceremony.
We also wanted to bring our friends and blended families together. We had briefly considered eloping, but then we realized that this might be the only chance to see so many of the people we love all in one room.
Blending people from out of town and different sides of the family at the same table and trying to be intentional about the time we spent with our guests, we really got to see connections form among our favorite people who otherwise might never have met.
Lastly, we wanted to feel present with one another. So many people say the day just flies by and they barely got to eat, let alone spend time with their new spouse. We were terrified of our wedding feeling like a performance with all the things we needed to check off or people we needed to see.
With that in mind, we planned a private moment right after the ceremony to decompress together, we opted for a sweetheart table at dinner where we talked and ate plenty, and we kept the ceremony and first dance relatively simple.
Knowing what needed to happen for us to have a great wedding day freed us to notice all the things that were going right. Many people showed up in big ways to support us, we laughed and celebrated, and as we stood at the ceremony, I was so unaware of what other people were thinking and feeling. I just was so happy to be marrying him.
Even my husband, who doesn’t love to be the center of attention and advocated for eloping at first, left with a big grin on his face. All of the silly little details –– my grandparent’s cake topper, our first dance song, getting ready with our oldest friends –– stopped being planning items and became symbols for the love that we came from, the life that we share together and the community we will continue to build.
“It felt like magic,” he said. And I felt it, too.
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