The Pre-Wedding Test: Why the Universe Tries to Break You 7 Days Out
Please trust me—I don’t share any of this to toot my own horn or to scare you for your own wedding week. I share it because, for some reason, the week before your wedding, every person, institution, and deity will do their best to test you.
I'm writing this on the Tuesday before my wedding, and the sheer volume of "strange things" that have happened is honestly baffling. But I share this to reassure you: you can survive pretty much anything the week of your wedding if you have a good partner and a good team. Strange things will happen, and you're just going to have to bounce back.
1. The Day-Drinking Disaster: Bride Down with a Cold
The first thing that happened? A cough, a sneeze, congestion. I made the fatal mistake of trying to surprise my fiancé at his bachelor party and spent a day drinking in the pool with him and ten of his best buddies. By the time I got back from that single-day visit, I was coughing, sneezing, and feeling super congested. And it’s stuck through the rest of the week.
As I write this, I am still not feeling 100%. Thankfully, Conner got me every decongestant, cough drop, and throat-soothing medication he possibly could from our local pharmacy. I feel like I'm on the mend, but starting your wedding week with a full-blown cold is exactly the kind of chaos I’m talking about.
2. The Great Dress Detachment
Next up, I went to try on my welcome party and second-look dresses. I was so excited for these pieces! I bought them nearly two years in advance, far before Connor had even proposed. I knew we were going to get married very early, and they were two pieces I could not live without.
Little did I know, I would put them on, and they would be falling off of me. I guess that's a reflection of hard work paying off, but it’s not exactly something you want to realize five days before your wedding.
I was about to run to Anthropologie and buy something entirely different, but my wedding planner suggested I try my local tailor to see if they could do a rush. The $98 it cost to adjust my welcome party outfit is well worth it to maintain the vision I had of myself in that moment and also to avoid paying hundreds of dollars for a new dress last minute. I actively chose not to try to get my second look outfit altered—I didn't love how it looked on me anymore, and I knew the alterations would be too complicated to account for in five days. Prioritize your sanity!
3. Tuesday's Trifecta of Chaos
Oh, Tuesday. You were a nightmare.
The Mystery of the Missing Nail Salon
I just found out that the place I was planning on getting my nails done on Wednesday is closed permanently. I called to confirm my appointment, and nobody answered. I didn't find this too odd at first, seeing as most nail salons are small businesses, and I left a voicemail. I then went to Yelp to see their location, and Yelp informed me the salon was permanently closed. I went to their website, and Wix let me know that the domain was not attached to any website. Thankfully, I was able to find another salon that can fit us in at the same time for the same services, but it was just a little speed bump I didn't exactly love.
The Place Card Color Crisis
In the meantime, my printer was not responding to my emails, so I had to go to a different local printer to make sure my place cards would be delivered on time. The trouble was, the design software I was using was outputting colors in RGB and hex codes, and it wasn't properly converting to CMYK. So all of my place cards were coming out a few shades too dark and not in line with the color brand I had established.
I had to remove the color backgrounds from every single place card, identify a proper CMYK value that reflected the color I was trying to make them, and resend all 155 place cards to the printer. Thankfully, they were able to adjust and print all of the final place cards in a timely manner.
The Case of the DJ on Duty
Oh, and I hadn't heard from my DJ in a minute. I needed to make absolutely sure that the Zoom link for my fiancé's grandparents and my international family was going to be functional. Where was he? Jury duty.
It's honestly a joke at this point, but these things happen. Thankfully, he was deeply apologetic about the situation his civic duty had put us in, and we set up a call for Wednesday night to go over the portal. Turns out my fiancé and I were so thorough in our filling out of the planning portal that we don't have much else to do.
4. The Last-Minute Venue Planner Swap
As if all of that wasn't enough, yesterday (Monday), our venue let us know that the lead planner who had been helping us with everything for the past nearly year and a half would be on PTO from Friday through Sunday!
So now we have somebody who's running our event who we have never met, never spoken to, and never interacted with—and who our planner has also never met or interacted with. I trust them to be a consummate professional, but I also have to mentally prepare for this person to not have as firm of a grasp on the venue as our original planner did. It's the ultimate test of trusting the process.
If you are planning your wedding, take it from me: strange, small things will go wrong, but if you have a great partner to grab the cold medicine, and if you have a good team to suggest a rush tailor, you will survive. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need a nap.