Pop the Bubbly First: Where to Start Planning a Wedding

Where do you start planning a wedding? Definitely not the minute you get engaged. You start by celebrating, then you sit down with your partner and work out what you want this wedding to feel like, and only after that do you open a spreadsheet.

I know, I know. Somebody has probably already sent you a checklist, and it probably starts with the venue. Put it down for a minute. It'll keep.

First, celebrate

Whoop whoop, you're engaged. Take a moment to celebrate it, properly, before anyone asks you about dates. Open the bubbly, ring the people you want to ring, go out for dinner and tell the waiter, wave your hand about a bit in the supermarket. (If the questions have already started, I wrote about that in Why Being Engaged Feels Like This.)

Then work out what you want, together

Sit down with your partner and talk about what it is that you want, why you want to throw a wedding at all, and how you want to celebrate your love. Leave your mum's version and your best friend's wedding out of it for now; you can let them back in later.

The feeling you're trying to capture will dictate how you then decide to plan it, so get specific. A few questions to have that conversation with, over the bubbly ideally:

• When we picture the day, who's actually in the room?

• Do we want it loud and late, or small, long and lazy?

• How do we love spending our time together, and what do we do that's properly ours?

• What do we want people talking about on the way home?

Rough answers are fine, as long as you'd recognise the right wedding if somebody described it to you.

Elope, 600 at a country estate, or 20 people abroad

Perhaps you want to elope, perhaps you want to have 600 of your nearest friends at a large country estate, perhaps you want to take 20 people to a different country. The feeling you're after tells you which.

Until you really feel into what a wedding means for you both, you can't really begin planning it.

What happens if you skip that bit

If you skip it, you're going to end up stuck with the standard advice timeline: book a venue, then the band, then your dress. Follow it from the top and you can end up with a day that wasn't yours, a cookie cutter of someone's idea of what a wedding "should" be.

Social media has made us think weddings need to look a certain way, and that's not true. Some of the greatest weddings I've ever been at didn't even look like weddings.

Make it look like the two of you

I always tell my clients it's really important that when your guests walk into your wedding, they can tell whose wedding it is.

The easiest way to make your wedding feel like you, instead of a template, is to start with a conversation about how you both enjoy spending your time, and what the things are that you do together. Then start to work those threads into the day and the entertainment itself. If your best weekends are long pub lunches that turn into dinner, maybe that's your reception. If you met at a gig, maybe the music is the thing you spend on and the flowers are the thing you don't.

There is no right or wrong way of doing this. Do what makes you happy, do what brings you joy, what gives you energy, what makes you laugh, smile and have fun, and go from there. That's your wedding, and it'll be bloody obvious to everyone who walks in.

So, where do you start?

Celebrate your engagement first and give it time. Then have the conversation with your partner about what you want, why, and how you like spending your time together. Let that tell you the shape: eloping, 600 at a country estate, 20 people abroad, or something nobody's done before. Only then pick up the timeline, and book things in the order your wedding needs.

If you've had that conversation and you still can't see the shape, or you can see it and don't know what comes first, that's what An Honest Hour is for. You bring it, I ask the awkward questions, and we decide.

Book the hour

An Honest Hour is sixty minutes on video with me for €195 (about $218, about £163). You pay when you book and can move it once, free, with 24 hours' notice, and a note from me follows within 24 hours: the decisions made and your next three steps. Calendly shows the times in your time zone.

Book the hour, €195

Lucie Forster, fifteen years of weddings. She runs To Have + To Help.