Wedding Planning 101

by Kelly Bare

After a long-planned trip to Paris with two dear college friends, I was finally ready to get down to it: planning the wedding.

Jonathan and I are so blessed—with health, great families, ample resources, lots of friends—that there really weren’t any significant limits. Neither of us had an overwhelming vision of exactly how we wanted it to be. We could make this celebration just about anything we wanted, anywhere we wanted. That kind of freedom is exhilarating—for about thirty seconds. Then it’s paralyzing.

What we needed was a peg to hang things on, a macro decision from which all the micro decisions would naturally flow. We quickly realized that there were four main interlocking elements: the date, the place (with the venue as a subset of that), the number of guests, and the budget. Date and place are interdependent for reasons of weather and availability. Size of guest list can dictate place, and vice versa; to some extent, date can impact how many people will show. Budget rules all.

Like solving a Sudoku puzzle, we began filling in the obvious.

Most any date would do. Our only criterion—and this is arbitrary—was to marry before either of us turned 30. Easy enough.