Realizing that your original dream wedding vision doesn’t fit within your budget constraints can be a real shock when you’re caught up in the excitement of planning your wedding. Particularly if you’ve been thinking about your future wedding for a long time these feelings have the potential to derail your planning process and make it hard to be excited about your big day.
The feelings of disappointment when you can’t afford your dream wedding can cause real distress. Working through the following steps will help reframe the situation and create a more positive mindset for your wedding planning. Reflect, Accept, Reframe and Prioritise.
Reflect on what is causing these feelings
A mix of sadness, embarrassment, shame, anger or guilt could be behind your feelings, and all of these are ok. Your wedding is probably the biggest event you have ever been responsible for planning, and the weight of family expectations, cultural traditions, and feelings of competition with family or friends may all be combined in creating your mindset as you first begin the planning process.
A mismatch of expectations between you and your future spouse may also be adding to the pressure.
Try to understand what are the biggest drivers for you and your partner, but you need to be honest here, and not deflect your feelings away in other directions.
For example, it can be hard to admit when you’re feeling jealous, and it may be easier to say that it’s not fair that a friend had a lot of help from their parents to pay for their wedding.
But without being honest about what you’re really feeling, you won’t be able to get past that feeling of envy, so this is an important step to complete.
Accept that disappointments happen
We ALL face disappointment many times throughout our life. We may miss out on promotions, or be hurt by our friends, or find ourselves in any number of difficult situations.
Many people have thought about their future wedding for years before they had even met their future spouse. Such a long time building expectations can mean that when the reality becomes clear it can be really hard to face.
Each time these disappointments happen in life it can really hurt, but we always get through these tough times, and things are ok afterwards. The same will be true this time. After being honest with yourself, and identifying what you’re really feeling about this situation, it will be easier to accept what is happening.
Reframe the situation and how you describe it
Now it’s time for some reality checks. Use this step to look more objectively at the situation. The reality is weddings can be VERY EXPENSIVE! Many aspects of the wedding industry are designed to encourage us to spend more, and as a result weddings today are a lot more expensive than when our parents were married. When you break the costs down into a cost-per-hour basis, there aren’t any other events in our lives where we would spend so much money, so it’s not unreasonable at all to try to keep this spend to a manageable level.
Another reality is that it is only a relatively small number of people who can honestly afford the types of weddings we see in magazines and on Instagram, even if it feels like everyone in the world can.
According to The Knot Real Wedding Survey 2021 the average wedding cost in the United States in 2019 was $28,000. Depending on your location this amount would not go close to covering the cost of the type of wedding we see in magazines, which are much closer to $100,000 events. Bridal magazines have given us an unrealistic idea of how our wedding should look (among other things!).
So, it’s not a reflection on you or your partner that all of the bells and whistles can’t happen exactly as you wished.
Try to think about things in a more positive light and remind yourself what you are excited about. Be proud of the budget you can afford on your own, and of the fact that you can plan an amazing wedding without starting your married life with the burden of financial stress.
Prioritize wedding items, and focus on most important
Now it’s time to discuss with your partner what is really important to you both for your wedding day.
Take your wedding wishlist, and re-write it in order of priority. Be brutal in this step, and think honestly about each item you are writing down, and consider if you had to choose between that item and the one next to it, which is more important?
Take a look at the things that are emerging at the top of your list, and try to categorise them into the following groups:
- Things that have meaning for the couple (either individually or together)
- Things that have meaning for the couple’s families (such as family or cultural traditions)
- Things that improve the guest experience (such as food, entertainment, wedding favors)
- Things that will improve the photographs (decorations, flowers, table settings etc)
These groupings will help you to be more clear about why something is important to you and what it will bring to the day.
Other questions you could ask each other are:
- Is it more important to you to have a large gathering of your family and friends with you on the day, or is it more important to you to say your vows to each other in a specific location around the world?
- Is a designer dress more or less important to you than a photographer attending for a whole day? You may be able to accommodate both of these things in your budget, but it’s important you have an idea where they both sit in the list of priorities.
As you have these discussions with your partner about whether an item is more or less important than something else you will begin to see your most important wishes emerge.
When you have completed your whole list take a look at the items towards the bottom. Now it should be easy to cross off or downsize the lowest priority items on the list, as you’ll be able to easily see they aren’t so important to you both, though they might have started as something you thought you couldn’t or shouldn’t do without.
Next take another look at your budget.
Review the items that fall just outside the budget range on your prioritzed list. Would tweaking the extra income or items you could sell list allow you include another couple of items? Would those things be important to you to be worth some extra work between now and the wedding?
With your revised budget, and revised wedding wish list you will now have a great starting point to pick up your wedding planning again with a fresh outlook. You will be clear on exactly what is important to you and your future spouse, and be able to describe why these things are important, which will help the remainder of your planning pass much more smoothly and happily.
Notes:
The Knot Real Wedding Survey:
https://www.wedinsights.com/report/covid-the-knot-real-weddings
