Marriage = Wedding

Does marriage begin before the wedding? The process of planning a wedding is filled with many challenges that provide the bride and groom with a first-hand taste of married life with the exception of those who have hired a wedding planner to manage all of the wedding details.

Nevertheless, planning your own wedding is a monumental task – often requiring good time and money management skills. Because of this great effort, many couples select a plan of attack such as deciding first who will foot the bill. For this reason, the size and magnitude of a wedding often depend on whether a couple pays for the wedding with their own money, or with mom and dad’s money. The trend, however, is that more couples are paying for their own weddings, which is why planning a wedding is a crazy simulation quite like married life. The interesting aspect of planning a wedding is that brides often take the planning process into their own hands as the groom takes a back seat.

I find that such an arrangement is an indication of how the couple will handle future decisions. The risk in having one partner do all the planning often becomes a game of assumptions wherein one partner will assume that the other wants to take on a task on their own as the other partner withdraws. Oddly enough couples that do share tasks equally in the planning process may very well end up having more success in their marriage as they take on a mutual roles. I think brides need to get grooms more involved in the wedding simply because it gives them the opportunity to not only learn about each other, but also identify how well they work together during challenging times. There are many lessons to be learned that will be helpful in facing a future together. In a nutshell, if the groom wants to know the meaning of fondant, Jordan almonds, or a calla lilies; I say, that brides should let them know!