Before we got engaged,

I definitely thought that I knew it all. I thought I could totally sympathize with my couples when it comes to the wedding process. Seeing so many weddings, being a part of them. And then having a long term partner. We have so many common denominators. Obviously, I get it. Or I thought I did.

I know now I definitely did not get it, because I used to think it was all a sparkly celebration. I thought of course there are small stressors day of, but overall your wedding is just a giant party in the name of finding the love of your life.

I’m going to choose to be a little naive and still call it a big, sparkly celebration.

But I see now that the path to sparkles is long and difficult.

Throughout our engagement, I’ve been googling and googling all the symptoms of planning fatigue and trying to come out ahead. I wanted to be prepared and be able to move on quickly from stress or negativity once I recognized what I was experiencing. I’m just always trying to come out ahead.

After knowing about post-planning depression, I learned that pre-wedding depression is a real thing and can leave brides overwhelmed and unmotivated. Basically it comes from all sides and you can expect to be depressed and stressed for a few years. Cool cool.

But all of these groups that were identifying symptoms and talking through it were brides. And they were talking about their experience planning and feeling the burden of planning. They were taking on all the pressure and the late nights and the stress and the family dynamics and all of it!

I kind of wrote about this a few week back. It’s necessary for me to feel like the planning weight is mostly evenly distributed. It would feel disingenuous for me to plan “my wedding” with minimal input from AJ. We have been life partners and best friends for so long that this needs to be our wedding, 100%.

So what does that mean if we’re both shouldering the wedding stress evenly? Does it mean we both get to have pre-wedding depression and feel totally overwhelmed most of the time? Probably.

I can say for sure that having even stress means it weighs completely on our relationship.

There’s a piece of advice I was given recently and I think about it all the dang time.

If you have all the tools to handle a situation, and you can’t, it means there are outside factors out of your control that are to blame. In other words, you are not to blame.

Usually when things are hard and we’re feeling unable to deal with things, I totally internalize it try to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m learning that I need to stop blaming myself as much, and blame just life in general and things that I can’t dictate.

Believe it or not, I did not consider that our upcoming wedding could be making our lives this hard. That’s basically why I’m writing this now. But of course it’s why life has been tough.

So what do we do now that we know the why? I think that’s a toughie, because mostly we just have to accept it. We have to accept that we’re going to be stressed, we’re going to be tired, we’re going to have more miscommunication and fight more. We might not be able to help that.

But we can not let it totally tear us down. We can forgive quicker, and give each other grace and understanding. The number one thing I think we can do is just do it together.