Getting engaged is a HUGE deal, and it’s majorly exciting! It can also be overwhelming because, where the heck do you start?
Well, I’m sharing three things that I think engaged couples should do FIRST before they do anything else, and I speak mostly from experience!
- Keep it to yourself. Before you write me off, hear me out! Totally counter-intuitive, right? But, I don’t mean forever! I mean just a few days. Really revel in the fact that you are engaged to the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with! Let that be just between the two of you, because once you announce it, it’s a never-ending barrage of questions like , “did you set a date yet?” “Where’s it going to be?” “Have you started planning?” “colors, themes, tell me everything!” Give yourselves some time together before announcing it to the world 🙂 I remember announcing it on the ride home from the proposal and I wish I had waited.
- You need to decide how you’re paying for it. I don’t mean set a budget. I mean figure out where the money is coming from. Steven and I knew from the beginning that we weren’t going to take any money from family members to help pay for our wedding. Why? Because we knew that as soon as we took their money, we would have to take their opinions. They would mean well, of course, but we didn’t want to deal with that. It was our wedding and we wanted it to be exactly how we wanted it to be. And so it was! We paid for it all in cash because we also didn’t want to have extra debt from a wedding.
- Figure out what is a priority for you on the wedding day. Is it the photography? The music? The cake? Once you figure out what matters the most to you, you’ll be able to stay focused on what’s important while you not only make all the decisions, but while you are planning out where you are going to spend your money! This will keep you from spending oodles of money in places that you don’t even really care about. Steven and I kind of did this, but we made a venn diagram about what we wanted out of our wedding, and what was in the middle (things we had in common) were what we focused on!
I hope these three tips were helpful to get you started with this season of starting to plan your wedding! If you have any tips you want to share, leave them below!
Linda is a Boston-based photographer specializing in weddings and creating family legacies. You can see more of her work online at lindabarryphotography.com, on Instagram, or on Facebook. If you want to reach out directly: linda@lindabarryphotography.com. To sign up for the monthly newsletter full of encouragement and real life, click here!
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