Weddings

I am what you would call a bride-to-be, soon to be married next month and our wedding plans have changed drastically, mostly due to my anxiety.

We started with this big plan, we decided that it was a must to have a live rock band and invite anyone we can, mostly all our family and friends, we wanted it to be big because that's what everyone does when they have a wedding... right? We started looking at venues and I started to feel panic spread through me as we looked at the cost, one venue alone was over £6000 and that didn't even include the catering which alone was over £4000, and you still had to think about the grooms suit, your wedding dress, entertainment, bridesmaids dresses, flowers, and I always used to wonder how couples would spend over 25k just on one day! now I was beginning to understand.

I started to look at wedding dresses and found that I hate wedding dresses, they're all white and stiff and heavy and I could barely breathe in any of them, I was originally looking for a pink wedding dress, something with light and floaty material but when I asked, in one shop I was told, "sorry we don't do prom dresses here" and in another shop, I was directed to their "blush" collection, whose colour ironically looked as though it were too shy to come out and show its true colour. Why are wedding dresses just a different shade of white? and why are they so heavy? My dream dress is the Irene Gown sold on Free People’s online store, that is what I call pink, light and floaty, but with the price tag of £1,295, I just can't afford that for a dress that I'd only wear once!

I found myself crippled with anxiety, I didn't want to do this anymore, I didn't want to get married, it was all too expensive and overwhelming. I had dreamed of travelling the world, but this wedding seemed to be mounting up to a trip around the world twice! I'd spent days and nights crying because of how stressed all of this was beginning to make me feel, this is when I decided that it was time to talk openly with my fiancé, I told him that I've been having doubts about getting married, about how anxious it's been making me feel and he listened to it all calmly, when I finished speaking he finally said that he had been thinking for a while now that maybe we should have a small wedding, cut everything back to basics and just get married with the minimum of witnesses and have a small celebratory dinner afterwards. It was as though the weight of the world lifted off my shoulders, I started crying for the relief I felt, I no longer felt the overwhelming anxiety and it finally felt as though it was our wedding and nobody else's! All this time I had thought that getting married meant splashing out and making sure that everyone is happy with the decisions you make for the day, but it's your day, why does it have to be big, why do you have to spend thousands of pounds? Why does the dress have to be white? I feel like there is so much pressure from society to do things in a certain way or you'll be frowned upon but let them frown I say, at the end of the day it is your wedding, it's your life.

I am glad that my fiancé and I talked so openly and honestly to one another because now it feels as though we are getting married because of our love for one another and not because we feel the need to show the world proof of that love because that is what it felt like before we drastically changed our plans, as though we had to make it bigger and better than the weddings gone before us. Surely it is better to have a much smaller wedding and use the money we would have spent on a world trip! And what memories you would make together to cherish for the rest of your married life. That to me sounds like the perfect wedding.