The Week Before Your Wedding: Emotions Edition
Your wedding day can kick up a lot of feelings, and we want to support you in how to best support yourself. Over the years, we’ve observed an incredible range of emotional experiences in the immediate week before the big day. As Tapestry planners, we continue to spin our logistical plates while seeking out ways to offer more support in the realm of feelings and experience.
Our hope is that this article reaches you in the early stages of the ramp up to share our experiences, generate increased self awareness, and offer tools to manage your internal universe as the excitement builds. Without further ado, here are some of the experiences you may have in the final weeks before your wedding:
YOU MIGHT NEED TO CALL IN HELP FROM YOUR COMMUNITY.
You may not have anticipated every small “to do’s” while tackling the big planning topics.
It’s true, even with a planner at your side, it’s damn near impossible to address all 5,000 decisions about your wedding before the week of. Some things simply start to come together at the last minute. However, in an emotionally charged state, those small things can loom larger than they need to and may become prime material for hyperfixation. Have support systems at the ready that you can lean on. We recommend identifying friends and family, both inside and outside the wedding party, and asking them in advance if they would be willing to assist with any week-of duties to help spread out the love.
You run out of time to get things done.
Related to the last point, if you try and do as much as you can yourself so that you don’t “burden” your loved ones, you’ll walk into your wedding day stressed and tired. We like a two-pronged approach to prevent this outcome. Not only should you have a community of humans who have consented to help, but you should also take measures to give yourself time to transition into the event. We love it when couples take three to seven days off before their wedding to zip up the items they’re invested in completing, communicate their needs to their support system, and get into a calm headspace for the event alongside their partner.
YOU MIGHT NEED TO SET SOME BOUNDARIES.
Your guests want more of your time outside of the event.
Depending on the size of your event, you may have a significant number of people who want to spend time with you. You might experience friends or family trying to drop in or grab an extra meal with you. We recommend couples hosting larger weddings to have scheduled tertiary events where their guests can spend additional time with them. That may look like hosting a welcome cocktail hour or dinner, a rehearsal event or meal, or a farewell brunch. Tertiary events give you a defined window to invest energy in your relationships and also have a defined end time so that you can rest and recharge.
Your event will not be perfect.
Yep, we said it: YOUR EVENT WILL NOT BE PERFECT. We’re trained professionals so hear us out on this one. At least once a season we have seen the expectation of perfection steal the experience away from the couple. You may know the feeling. It’s the same feeling that stops you from starting a new project or learning a new skill for fear that you will mess up, or that others will see you as a beginner, or that it won’t be worth the hassle. It causes you to stress out, shut down, or lash out in anticipation of or at the first sign or something not going the way you anticipated. It’s uncomfortable and the fear of disappointment is so big and scary that it shuts you down so that you don’t have to entertain the possibility of the full feeling by reacting early. We know this feeling because it can show up in a lot of different ways in life. The most heartbreaking thing to witness is a person whose day is “ruined” because one thing didn’t go perfectly to plan. That dark, angry, stressed out point of fixation shades out all the love, connection, and joy that surrounds them. So if you feel yourself gripping tight to perfection, or holding fear in your belly for the failure of that expectation, let go. Practice letting go now. There are too many people and processes involved in this day for anyone or anything to match your expectation of perfection. The day will go on. People are looking out for you. Things will adapt in a unique way that can only exist on your day. Beautiful experiences are available. The day will be perfect if you simply let it be the way that it is.
YOU MIGHT NEED TO SET TIME ASIDE FOR JUST YOU.
You may experience others around you acting strange or becoming emotionally charged.
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times: weddings can kick up a lot of dust. Even the most prepared, grounded, resourced, and conscientious person may experience waves of thoughts or feelings that can be emotionally hard to manage. Now, multiply that emotional vulnerability by the number of close family and friends you will be spending quality time with. Just as you may experience lots of big, deep, loving feelings in connection to other people, you might also experience some stressful, confusing, or scattered feelings. We recommend setting aside time every day (twice a day, if you can) to emotionally check in with yourself and regulate. Take opportunities to get in touch with what belongs to you and what may belong to other people. Give yourself space to down-regulate your nervous system. Have a safe person to share any thoughts or feelings with. This same person (or a therapist) may be a good person to practice any requests to emotionally charged guests with before delivering it directly. Do not be afraid to ask for what you need or to put well-considered boundaries around emotions that are not yours to digest. If you want to formalize some mindfulness practices among your community to help set the tone, you might set up a group fitness class, yoga class, meditation, catered meal, or spa treatment for everyone to relax and enjoy.
You may need to write your vows.
And if you’ve put them off until now, you aren’t alone! Sometimes vows are a tricky, sticky thing to put to paper. Some people just perform better under a deadline. Whomever you may be, check in with yourself and see if you have the time and energy to write your vows. If so, and if it’s important to you, put that time on the schedule RIGHT NOW so that you know when you’ll be able to take action on this important task. If you’re looking for a guided structure to write your vows and can devote a few hours to the task, check out this resource we wrote to help you out. If, at any point, the act of writing vows is only adding stress to your life, know that you can always substitute that decision with something else. Rather than exchanging your vows in a ceremony, you can write letters to one another that you read the day of your wedding. You can also ask your officiant to substitute “Repeat after me” style vows into the ceremony to take the pressure off of producing your own written words.We find a lot of purpose in gathering with our community to talk about mindful steps towards marriage. If anything in this preparatory article lit you up, we’d love to hear about it. If you’re a married couple who has had any experiences in the emotional ramp up to your day that you’d like to share or pass along to your community, we’d love to see you in the comments section below.
Photos courtesy of Lessie Blue Photography.
We find a lot of purpose in gathering with our community to talk about mindful steps towards marriage. If anything in this preparatory article lit you up, we’d love to hear about it. If you’re a married couple who has had any experiences in the emotional ramp up to your day that you’d like to share or pass along to your community, we’d love to see you in the comments section below.