I Spent So Much Time Planning My Wedding That I Almost Forgot to Be Engaged

How to Enjoy Your Engagement While Planning a Wedding

When people picture engagement, they imagine champagne toasts, date nights, showing off the ring every chance they get, and counting down to the wedding. But no one imagines spending their Tuesday night arguing about chair rentals, spending an hour comparing invitation paper thickness, or lying in bed wondering if inviting one coworker means you have to invite the other three. Yet somehow, that's where so many of us end up.

I remember myself waiting to this time of my life so badly. I wanted to feel like a princess focus on good exciting event! Then little by little, wedding planning started to feel like a burden that followed me everywhere. Dinner dates with my fiancé somehow ended up as discussions about wedding day transportation logistics. Phone calls with my mom devolved into debates about centerpieces. My social media algorithm was hijacked by videos convincing me I needed custom cocktail napkins.

Without realizing it, I had turned one day into my entire life.

I don't think brides are warned about this enough. The wedding is one day, but engagement is a season. If we're not careful, we spend the entire season preparing for one day instead of actually living it.

Looking back, I wish I had gone on more spontaneous dates. I wish we had taken more walks where we weren't talking about the wedding. I wish I had protected our energy a little more fiercely from "the big day."

There's a concept in behavioral science called the arrival fallacy: the belief that happiness will finally arrive once we reach a certain milestone. Raise your hand if you have thought to yourself: "I'll relax once we book the venue" or "I'll feel better after I find the dress." There's always another milestone, checklist, or decision holding you back from enjoying the present moment.  Engagement isn't meant to be a waiting room. It's meant to be reveled in.

One thing that helped me was creating what I called wedding-free time.

I decided that certain evenings would be completely off-limits for wedding talk. If a wedding thought popped into my head, I'd write it down for the next day. As a chronic Type A planner, it felt almost irresponsible at first. But eventually, it reminded me why we were getting married in the first place. We laughed more. We talked about work, travel, books, and everything except table layouts. And when I returned to planning the next day, I made better decisions because I wasn't mentally exhausted.

The wedding industry tells us to make every detail unforgettable, but I actually think the opposite is true. Most details will be forgotten, but the feeling your wedding instills will live on forever. Your guests won't remember whether the menus were letterpress or digital print. They'll remember how the room felt. And long after the flowers are gone and the cake has been eaten, you'll remember your engagement, especially if you made an active effort to choose each other over planning nonsense over and over again.

So here's my gentle reminder, especially if your to-do list feels endless today: Plan the wedding, but don't "skip" your engagement. Go on dates that have nothing to do with seating charts. Watch a movie without opening Pinterest halfway through. Celebrate small milestones instead of rushing to the next one. The wedding deserves your attention, but your relationship deserves even more.

And years from now, I hope one of your favorite memories isn't just the day you got married. I hope it's the months leading up to it, when you and your fiance were building a life together, even if you occasionally got distracted by napkins.