The Wedding Day: For Better or For Worse
The Wedding Day:
For Better or For Worse
By: Nicki, Andrea & Jill
Save the dates, bridal showers, bachelorette parties and wedding invites are flooding our mailboxes. . .
HELLO WEDDING SEASON!
Whether you are planning a wedding, dreaming of your wedding or have already walked down the aisle, ‘tis the season to think about weddings! All the women here at The Boudoir Studio are married and can’t help but compare what our wedding days looked like and most interestingly, what we would change about our big day!
It is so easy to get wrapped up into the planning process that we end up losing sight of such an important milestone: marriage. I remember having a fight with my now-husband in the middle of the wedding aisle at Hobby Lobby deciding if we really needed the $40.00 cake stand that looked like a tree stump. Its final resting place is on our coffee table and it still makes me laugh (seriously, why did I have to have this thing?!). After getting married, I felt like if we survived wedding planning. . . we can survive anything!
Here are the “for better” and “for worse” wedding day stories from The Boudoir Studio Ladies. . .
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Nicki:
Asif and I were high school sweethearts and got married in 2001, after our first year of college (Bible School, actually!). We got married on June 2nd, right between our birthdays so I had just turned 19 and he was about to turn 21. We were so young!! We had never even been to a wedding together, Pinterest wasn't invented yet (lol), and we had no money! Soooo. . . We left most of the planning up to my parents and tried to be as affordable as possible for their sake. We weren't very picky, thankfully!
Here's what I loved about our wedding:
Asif is Pakistani and the weddings in his culture last for several days and are Islam-centered. However, Asif had converted to Christianity in high school so we wanted our wedding to be Christian-centered. In order to combine our 2 cultures, the best compromise we could come up with was to wear Pakistani wedding clothes and have a Christian ceremony. My dress was gorgeous, Asif's mom was able to arrange for our outfits to come from Pakistan with the help of her family there. My dress was actually worn by Asif's aunt for her wedding! I felt so honored to wear it. I love that our priorities were to honor both of our backgrounds and families as best as we could, I have no regrets about that.
However, there are certain things we would have done differently looking back. And having spent years in the wedding industry now, our eyes have been opened to a whole new world that we were clueless of before!
“ I love that our priorities were to honor both of our backgrounds and families as best as we could, I have no regrets about that. ”
So our number one regret is not spending money on a professional photographer. Yikes, there it is! Yep, here we are, husband and wife owners of a photography studio and we didn't get this right at our own wedding!! We had a family member take photos for free and he was very very kind and generous to do so, but we didn't even take the time to chat with him about what photos we wanted! He just showed up that day and so did we! Needless to say, we didn't get the images we had hoped for and as time has gone on, we regret that more and more.
Hindsight is 20/20 and our entire wedding would look quite different if we were to do it all over again today. However, there is something beautiful about the innocence and naivety that we had about the wedding industry. We didn't know better and so we weren't bothered about it at the time. We were just happy to be getting married and were far more focused on our marriage than our wedding.
Well, here we are 18 years later, looking forward to many more decades together so I think it's ok that we weren't too concerned about having a perfect dream wedding. We just wish we had better pictures to show for it!!
Andrea:
I often wonder what it would have been like to plan a wedding (anything really) before the time of Pinterest! I remember before I even got engaged I had already started “My someday future wedding” board and had all these extravagant things posted, all these amazing DIY little detail decorations posted, pins with how to do basically everything: vows, playlists, favors you name it! It really was a beautiful board! After getting engaged and actually really starting to plan I realized that I, in fact, could not incorporate all 500 of my pins on my wedding board because that would take approximately 5 years to complete with 5 times my wedding budget OH and also I would have to actually do the DIY projects. . .did I mention I hate DIY projects?
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So that brings me to one of the best things I did while planning my wedding. I hired someone to do all the decorations. Was it as extravagant as some of my pins? No, but she was amazing!
Zach and I met with the decorator and she had multiple mock tables set up with various centerpieces and linens that matched with the vision (and budget) we had given to her. We picked out what we liked which happened to be a combination of pieces from about 3 tables. Went over colors, flowers, cake tables, head table, all those special tables you have on a wedding day. We came up with a plan and she took care of the rest. It was amazing. They came in, did all the setup and all the clean up after the wedding. I didn’t have to send any of my friends and family to do it, I didn’t have to wonder what to do with totes of wedding decorations afterward, and also, let’s not forgot, I didn’t have to do really any DIY projects!!
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My second favorite thing I did was my mom and I grew all of the flowers for my wedding. My mom has a passion for gardening and is very good at it. So I presented the idea of growing all my own flowers. Literally the next day my dad was out back planning where we would plant all the bulbs (we decided on tulips). My mom and I headed out to pick out the bulbs and we got them planted, hundreds of them! And when the spring of my wedding came, timing had to be right, and all we could do was wait and hope that mother nature was going to be on our side. She definitely was! I had all the beautiful fresh flowers for my ceremony site, bouquets, and reception. The best part is every year at my parents all the tulips continue to come up around our anniversary!
That brings me to what would I have changed about my wedding.
While ultimately if I were to do the whole things over again I would have done a very small destination wedding, and then maybe over the summer do a big BBQ and invite everyone. I think in planning my wedding I got caught up in making everyone happy and I definitely had a little bit of “keeping up with the jones” type syndrome. I was 24 when we got married and I just wasn’t confident enough to do something different then what everyone around me was doing. Now at almost 30, I would have no problem telling everyone that there will not be a big wedding.
But what would I have changed about my wedding specifically? Well it’s an easy 2 things. (Let's keep in mind this was before I personally was in the world of photography and I had this elaborate Pinterest board I was trying to recreate without the budget to match.)
“I had all the beautiful fresh flowers for my ceremony site, bouquets, and reception. The best part is every year at my parents all the tulips continue to come up around our anniversary! ”
So I had two photographers I was looking at: one who had far more experience and her portfolio was amazing but a little more on the traditional side; the second was newer to photography and had a much smaller portfolio but had all those “Pinterest-y” looking images in it. So I went with her. To this day this is my biggest regret, and now being in the industry it makes it even harder. From my entire wedding, I have maybe 2-5 images that came out good enough to do anything with. I didn’t know the questions to ask or what was important to tell her, and she didn’t ask any of these questions of us. For example, our venue had very little natural light hence all our images of our reception were dark and grainy. This would have been important to know that at the time since she only photographed with natural light.
I could truly go on and on about this but I won't, so onto the second thing I would have changed. We had a band play during our cocktail hour until after cake cutting. Then we had a DJ take over. Again, just having a band at the time was different than any other wedding I had been to so far, so how could we have just a band that would be no fun!? WRONG! The band was amazing and we absolutely should have had only the band do the whole reception! I can’t believe I am writing this because after my husband reads this, 5 years later, he is going to be in all his glory telling me I told you so!!
Jill:
I have been married for a little over a year and a half to my husband Josh. I was more of an atypical bride as I had not thought about or dreamt about my wedding at all growing up. With all that being said, my wedding day was a combination of what I wanted and what Josh wanted. One of the few things we agreed on was that we both loved fall and the changing colors of the leaves. I, personally, have had the honor of photographing many weddings and I still cannot believe that I agreed to an outdoor ceremony! I have seen ceremonies being canceled and relocated because of the weather. I have seen people looking like they were being blown away on a windy day or harsh summer lighting.
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My favorite part of my wedding day was getting the ceremony right. When it comes down to it, I was marrying the most incredible man and we spent a lot of time planning where, how and when we were going to say our “I dos” and what exactly it would look like. Josh spent weeks building the pergola under which we became man and wife. It is now in our backyard as a focal point for our garden. We spent a weekend finding the perfect spot in a forest where our guests would have a “not too long” yet “not too short” walk to find an intimate spot to witness the ceremony. My brother was the officiant who read a one-of-a-kind ceremony script that I wrote. We were surrounded by the beauty of nature and 100 people who were mostly family and very close friends. The rain did hold out until the ceremony when there was a delicate misting of rain that happened just as I started down the aisle. If I had to pick one thing that I could be happy about our wedding, it’s that we got the most crucial point of the day perfect.
There are a couple of things that I would go back and do differently. I raise my middle finger to Pinterest! (lol) UGH! So to tie in nature into our reception and favors, we decided on this potentially great idea of giving plants away as favors. 100 mini clay pots with a single plant in each.
If you are planning a wedding… listen to me. Do not under any circumstance believe you can keep 100+ little plants alive and thriving by your wedding day.
It was so sad to see every guest leave with a wilted plant. We should not be remembered in this way! Josh and I spent 6 months growing these little things from seeds and watering them daily only to have them on the brink of death by the wedding. It was too much work and too much stress.
“If I had to pick one thing that I could be happy about our wedding, its that we got the most crucial point of the day perfect. ”
The second thing I would change is not allowing my DJ to pull me away from greeting tables. We ended up missing an entire table of people that: 1. I never met and 2. traveled across the US to be there for our wedding day. I still cringe thinking back to the moment where we had to stop and partake in the formal dances instead of thanking guests for coming to our wedding. Everyone there is on your time, the DJ can wait!
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If you ask any married woman, she could probably tell you 100 things that she would do differently if she could get married all over again. It goes to show that no wedding ends up being absolutely perfect, just like not every relationship is perfect or every day is perfect. We put so much pressure on ourselves to make our big day flawless that it can be easy to lose sight of why we are there in the first place.
Marriage is about loving a person through sickness and health, better or worse and for richer or poorer. What better day to roll with the punches than the first day you become one with your partner. Be nice to yourself and to every bride you encounter this wedding season because it’s the start to a lifetime of ups and downs.
With the exception of Asif & Nicki’s photos, the incredible photos provided here were taken by Asif at
A Touch of Elegance Photography which is a sister company to The Boudoir Studio.
Asif & Nicki’s incredible photos were taken by Dee from 13 One Photography!