People who know me well would call me a positive and enthusiastic person. “You’re the one I call when I need a cheerleader,” a close friend told me years ago. “You are so good at helping me remember to stop and celebrate the little things.”

This is mostly true — I love a celebration, and I’m good at finding a reason to turn almost anything into one. The sun is setting later? Sounds like a good reason to crack a beer on the porch. We happen to be texting around dinner time? That’s the perfect excuse to invite you to join us. Tulips looking sharp at the grocery store? Seems like we’re making a tablescape, which is going to require dessert. And candles.

“There is nothing I’d rather do than spend quality time with people I love.”

If you’re always in the mood to have a good time, you’ll find reasons to convince others to join you absolutely everywhere, and there is nothing I’d rather do than spend quality time with people I love. My idea of heaven is any gathering, big or small, where the food is good, the drinks and music are flowing, the sun or stars are sparkling and the dress code is “festive” — and everyone I love is turned out and having the time of their lives.  

So it might surprise you to learn that I didn’t actually have the best time at my wedding. It definitely surprised me!

The wedding:

Lets get this out of the way before I share this story: I’m still married to my spouse and I am more in love with him now than I was that day. And our wedding was great. 

But would I call it The Best Day of My Life? Not by several country miles. And it’s not because it wasn’t, by any standard, a good wedding. It was! It’s just that the overwhelming emotion I was feeling leading up to and then during the day itself was stress. And I wasn’t remotely prepared for that to be the case. 

“Our wedding was great. But would I call it The Best Day of My Life? Not by several country miles.”

I got married in the summer of 2015, in a truly beautiful event where nearly 200 people came to dance and cheer and joyfully launch us into this next stage of our lives. Both the ceremony and the reception were in my in-laws’ spectacular backyard. It was a total labor of love made possible entirely by our friends and family. I treasure the memory of our wedding, and all of the efforts and contributions that the people we loved put into making it happen. But I was blindsided by how hard it was to plan a wedding, how much I’d agonize over the many details and the cost and the coordination. And worse, I’d had no idea how deeply I’d absorbed certain expectations about how it was supposed to look and how I was supposed to feel on the day until it was happening in real-time. 

A certain kind of wedding in our culture is so much more than just a vows ceremony and an after party. It’s a complicated, logistical web of expectations, traditions, questions, and compromises that require many emotionally charged and shockingly expensive decisions get locked down months in advance of the actual day, committing you not just to your beloved, but to venues and clothes and themes and flowers that you (if you’re anything like me) feel both strongly about and can’t believe you have to think and talk about so much. 

“A certain kind of wedding in our culture is so much more than just a vows ceremony and an after party.”

And if you’re the bride? The Bride? This whole day is All About You! Except of course, it isn’t. And, depending on the sort of wedding you have, it isn’t even entirely about your relationship, either. 

You have, after all, a community of loved ones to consider — their needs, abilities, preferences, feelings, and (let’s just say it!) their finances — which will play a pretty hefty role in the shaping of the event. I remember looking at my fiance (now-husband of almost 10 years!) and saying, with a dawning awareness, “Ohhhh, so the wedding is really about our community, isn’t it?” If you want people to be there, you have to consider travel and diets and budgets and physical abilities and so much more. You’re creating a party around your relationship, but you’re event planning — which is really about the guests. 

Yes, at the end of the day, if all went well, we would end up married. But that idea about it being The Best Day of My Life? It was clear to me within the first month after our engagement that I was just not going to be that kind of bride. 

The stressors:

I hate event planning. I much prefer to throw together a dinner party on the fly, everything coming together in those spur-of-the-moment inspirations based on what’s at the farmer’s market. There isn’t a question of invitations or the ensuing decision of which tier of stationery company to go with, whether to hire a calligrapher or teach yourself to hand letter. It’s not event planning at all, really, because it’s spontaneous! And spontaneity is one of the hacks I use to mitigate my Type A tendencies to try to keep everything under my control. 

If I’m winging it, I can approximate some semblance of laid back. Everything that goes well is a beautiful piece of luck that only adds to the celebration. But if I’m actually involved in the execution of something specific? Then come the expectations, those thieves of joy. If everything meets my expectations, it isn’t really something to celebrate so much as simply checked off my to-do list. But when things don’t meet my expectations, then I begin to fixate on what went wrong. 

“If I’m actually involved in the execution of something specific? Then come the expectations, those thieves of joy.”

At my wedding, a lot went… let’s not call it “wrong” but just not exactly to plan. Here’s an incomplete list of what didn’t exactly meet my expectations:

  • I didn’t love my dress. It was a beautiful dress, but for so many reasons, I didn’t hold out for the off-shoulder dress I’d always imagined wearing when I got married, and instead said yes to one that was in budget on the one and only day I went shopping with my mom and sister to look for one. 
  • I sprained my ankle at the rehearsal, making it impossible for me to wear the beautiful, expensive wedge heels that were ideal for walking through grass and for which my dress had been hemmed to accommodate. 
  • My brother, who had traveled to be there, was exhausted and openly furious that he was expected to attend the rehearsal dinner, which I took really personally. I spent the car ride from the rehearsal to the dinner in tears. 
  • When I told the makeup artist I would prefer a lighter touch on my eyeliner from what she’d done at the trial, she ended up doing something totally different with a light brown pencil that made me look like I had pink eye.
    • Aaron didn’t watch me walk down the aisle, waiting to turn instead when I was just feet away, which was not something we had ever discussed but have since learned we both had strong ideas about. (Apparently it’s very old school not to look at the bride until she reaches the altar!) It made me really confused and nervous to be staring at his back on my way toward him.
    • Remember my sprained ankle? Because of the grass and the length of my dress, I had to wear these truly hideous brown leather platform flip-flops that would fit my brace.

    • I didn’t want to make our wedding party miss the reception by taking hours on photos, so I told the photographer to keep the post-ceremony session short. So I only have one single bridal portrait where my mouth isn’t doing something weird, and only one posed photo with my new husband.
      • I saw my husband exactly three times at the reception: for the first dance, during the meal and speeches, and when we cut and fed each other cake.

        It was overwhelming and busy and I was worried about trashing my in-laws’ yard and bothering their neighbors, worried whether the people from my wedding party who were there on their own were having a nice time, and worried about whether my parents and the other family members who had helped to pay for everything felt like everything was going well and like we were appropriately grateful. 

        “What did it say about me and the kind of person I was, if the day meant to celebrate marrying the love of my life wasn’t pure, unadulterated bliss?”

        Don’t get me wrong — I had fun too. But after, when I identified the enormous feeling in my chest as relief that it was all over, I felt blindsided. What did that mean? What did it say about me and the kind of person I was, if the day meant to celebrate marrying the love of my life wasn’t pure, unadulterated bliss?

        A second interpretation:

        I’m not going to beat around the bush here: It means nothing. 

        That’s right! The fact that I look back on my wedding and remember feeling worried and stressed more than anything else has no bearing on my marriage or happiness at all. All that it means is that I felt worried about normal things and stressed by a high-pressure situation. That’s it.

        “The fact that I look back on my wedding and remember feeling worried and stressed more than anything else has no bearing on my marriage or happiness at all.”

        Event planning is a pain. Spending other people’s money is awkward, and spending your own money in the Wedding Industrial Complex also isn’t fun. Even DIYing has a steep cost, since it’s a lot of work to cut corners and try to produce results that are, if not as good as the top-shelf florists’ and calligraphers’ professional work, at least done well enough to seem charming.

        And if you think it’s hard to face social media pressure in general, just wait until the algorithm learns that you’re getting married. Between the onslaught of stunning wedding images and the comments people offhandedly make about what they think is essential or tacky about weddings, the pressure to provide an event that meets everyone’s approval can be crushing. 

        Okay, so I may not be the ideal bride. But here’s where the fact of who I actually am comes into play. Because you might have forgotten, with all this bellyaching, that I am actually a very positive person! One who loves to celebrate!

        That list of stuff that was less than perfect that I shared earlier? Each one has a pretty important flipside. It might surprise you to learn that these aren’t a laundry list of regrets at all, but a much-cherished collection of memories that make our wedding ours. 

        “It might surprise you to learn that these aren’t a laundry list of regrets at all, but a much-cherished collection of memories that make our wedding ours.”

        Proceed for my relentless optimism and the hard-won lessons I learned from not loving my wedding.

        • My mother graciously offered to purchase my dress, and so we went shopping while I was visiting for the holidays with my little sister, drinking champagne at fancy bridal boutiques. The dress I chose was perfect for the venue and type of wedding we were having, fit me beautifully, and was under budget. It would have been really hard to get to shop with my family like that again before our wedding, and looking back on my photos, I know I made the right choice. (I have since made a point of buying off-the-shoulder dresses for other formal events — your wedding doesn’t have to be the last time you go all out!)
        • Did I mention how I sprained my ankle? I was running across the lawn to greet two of my childhood friends who’d flown in from Texas to be in my wedding party. I hadn’t seen one of them in years, and it was in the process of throwing myself into her arms that I tripped on a branch. She lifted me up and spun me around, and I barely even felt the pain.
        • The two bridesmaids who drove me to our rehearsal dinner and comforted me while I cried about my brother’s annoyance shared words of wisdom that not only helped me reset for the rest of the evening, but have served me well when I remember them over the years since. Here’s what they told me: “People are still going to be who they are, even at a wedding. They might even be more themselves, or the less-than-best versions of themselves. Just because it’s a special day, doesn’t mean they get a different personality.” Mind-blowing, right?
        • Did I love my makeup? Nope. Is it oddly freeing to realize that I can do my makeup better on any given night out? Yeah, it really is. I’m grateful that I don’t have some unattainable, perfect image of myself I could never recreate. I still look like myself, and that’s something that matters to me.
        • One of my husband’s core memories about our wedding is this: As a super introvert, he’d spent the morning getting ready in his childhood bedroom, watching tons of people fill the backyard and feeling exponentially nervous as time passed. Waiting for me at the altar, his heart pounding and his palms sweating, he says that when he finally turned and saw me just a few feet away standing in the sunshine, he was overcome with certainty and calm. There’s a photo of this moment, and it’s beautiful. Knowing how he felt and seeing the image that reflects it far outweighs the memory of momentary confusion while I was walking up the aisle. I love this story, and he tells it often.  
        • My bridesmaid and college bestie Ari spent the entire morning of my wedding calling every store within 20 miles, asking them to pull whatever four-inch platform shoe in a size 7 they had. Then she went from store to store, taking photos of the options, until we settled on the ugly brown leather flip-flops. They fit around my ankle brace, gave me enough height for my dress, and worked on grass. I love the photos with these ugly shoes in them, because I just remember this incredible woman and everything she did to get them to me in time.

        • No, I don’t have many posed photos of Aaron and me after the wedding. But we did a photoshoot in the mountains at golden hour the next day, and it was way better.
        • All of the candids from our reception that show Aaron and me dancing and chatting and hugging our guests when we weren’t together are so full of love and joy that I have no regrets about not seeing him more at the party. I mean, I live with the dude now. I see him a lot more than any of those precious people. 

        I can’t imagine a scenario now where we’d invite nearly 200 people from childhood, college, and beyond to come together with our families and have a big party. No, I wasn’t able to have long, intimate conversations with each of them, but they were there! I got to laugh with my 5th grade best friend and shout-sing Beyoncé with my grad school housemates and do a line dance with my favorite coworker while my cousin from Chile and aunts and uncles from Florida played cornhole next to the dance floor.

        What our wedding actually was ended up being something I couldn’t have planned or predicted, but it was so much better that way. 

        The art of holding your plans loosely

        Anytime I’ve chatted with someone planning their own wedding, I’ve found that I can barely control the need to tell them how much I hated planning my own. I don’t want to be a downer, I just want to help relieve some of the pressure about how they are supposed to feel about it. It might end up being The Best Day of Their Life, but will almost certainly be one of the most stressful. Which is normal and fine! Why not talk about that a little more?

        “It might end up being The Best Day of Their Life, but will almost certainly be one of the most stressful. Which is normal and fine! Why not talk about that a little more?”

        We have invested too much as a culture in weddings and what they’re supposed to mean. It’s all too easy to take any difficult feeling or series of mishaps around a wedding and imagine that it must mean something big is wrong. We haven’t seen enough examples of weddings that are totally okay or even less-than-great followed by healthy happy marriages — even though they must exist! (Obviously with the exception of Charlotte and Harry, iykyk!)

        Otherwise, our mainstream love stories tend to end with the wedding. After that, we have the somewhat bleak landscape of American marriage to look forward to: aka a lifetime of sitcom dynamics where the joke is that the spouses lightly hate each other. Fun!

        What if instead, we just let the wedding be what it is? What if we approach any highly anticipated milestone event — a big birthday, a huge vacation, a baby shower — with a lighter touch, one that doesn’t assign meaning to every detail? Or even better: What if we could shift enough to make room for the unexpected, just to see what happens?

        “What if we approach any highly anticipated milestone event with a lighter touch, one that doesn’t assign meaning to every detail?”

        One of my favorite memories of my best friend of 30 years is from her own wedding day, when she had decided she was fully finished making decisions. From the moment she woke up, she was just going to enjoy herself, and let whatever happened happen. She was so committed to her relaxation and joy of this day (an inspiration to us all, really — absolute QUEEN), that when the wedding planner came rushing into the bridal suite in a visible panic, Mallory barely blinked.

        “We never settled on the song for the string quartet to play while you walk up the aisle!” the planner shouted. A hush fell over the room, as a dozen women collectively held their breaths, absorbing the gravity of the situation. But Mallory, who was getting her hair done and calmly sipping champagne, was completely unruffled. “What song should I tell them to play?” the planner asked, becoming visibly more agitated. 

        “What’s your favorite song?” Mallory asked. “Tell them to play the one you like.” Then she offered the planner some bubbles.

        The message was clear: This is not an emergency. It could have been, and that room full of women was certainly on the verge of launching into the fray to address it immediately. But the bride sets the tone, and the bride was fine. The wedding planner chose one of the songs from a list they’d discussed months ago, and it was beautiful. I don’t remember what the song was, but I do remember Mallory in this moment, the embodiment of the idea that someone else’s urgency isn’t necessarily our emergency.

        Iconic, right?

        The actual “Best Day of Your Life”

        What does it mean to have a perfect wedding? How do you talk about it, what memories do you share? No offense to anyone who had a perfect wedding (if you even exist!), but to be honest, it seems perfectly boring. There are only so many times you can oooh and ahh over how much went well, how everything was exactly as you hoped it would be. There’s such little character there, not much more to learn from or laugh about or share with a disbelieving group of friends swapping stories over happy hour years down the road. Because it’s the stuff that goes a little off course that makes the best memories, isn’t it? The things going awry that, rather than ruining the day, transform it into personalized lore, the sort of truly special memories that you love to look back on and talk about for years to come.

        “It’s the stuff that goes a little off course that makes the best memories, isn’t it?”

        These big events are just blips in our lives. They are a single dot on a timeline full of ordinary days made up of habits and routines that we rarely consider despite their extraordinary presence in our day-to-day realities. Of course there will be stress and grumpy brothers and the wrong flowers at our weddings. But there will also be the people who held you and laughed with you and called around to find you a new pair of last-minute shoes. Those are the things that matter.

        I don’t think it’s possible to plan The Best Day of Your Life. I’m not even sure how you decide that, anyway, what metrics you use to measure all the factors and compare all of these great days before crowning the winner? In my experience, the best days are the ones that sneak up on you, days that aren’t remotely perfect at all. There might even be some tough or dull or weird parts of the day itself — in fact, I think there probably should be, just so that you can really notice it when, suddenly, you find yourself aware of true, unfiltered, unbidden happiness despite it all.

        “In my experience, the best days are the ones that sneak up on you, days that aren’t remotely perfect at all.”

        One of the best days of my life happened during Thanksgiving week a few years ago when we were potty training our two-year-old daughter. We’d covered our entire living room in towels and blankets, and she was stark naked for nearly the entire week while we muddled through the age-old tradition of teaching a headstrong toddler how to pay attention to her body. We were supposed to be watching her for telltale signs that she had to go, so Aaron and I didn’t have our phones around, and we spent entire days dancing, chasing, and cleaning up behind our wild baby girl, in all her rolly polly glory. In the middle of it all, the feeling came, and nothing could have prepared me for it: It was absolute bliss.

        That’s the flipside of what it means to not absolutely love every second of what’s supposed to be The Best Day of Your Life: One ordinary day you might find yourself unshowered and exhausted and covered in pee, only to realize that you’d never known happiness like it. You can’t plan for that day; you can only hope that when it comes, you’re prepared to notice it.

        Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she writes about motherhood, artmaking, and work culture. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.