Military Brides
MomoChun
member
Wedding planning while states apart.
How do you do it. We talk on the phone and text consistantly, but I feel as if the stress just piles on and on the more we plan and see how much money this is all going to cost. We are both E-4 in the Navy, and I am on shore duty in CT while he is dry docked in VA. Is there any advice to get us through this without ripping each other to shreds after a few months?
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Re: Wedding planning while states apart.
We arent really "fighting" more like bickering every single time we tal on the phone. It has gotten to the point of not even planning. We havent talke wedding for a couple weeks
Our vision is the same. Small wedding Closefriends and family only, no longer than 2 hour reception with all the traditional things (garter/bouqet toss, first dance, cake cutting, ect.), and were making it as fun and untraditional as possible.
We just feel like its never going to get easy for us because WE are hosting AND paying for the entire thing unless we absolutely need help.
I think I will do the spreadsheet idea. I have just been writing everything down. I have a ton of loose leaf papers (all that I put into my wedding planning binder), and printed out things. We are going to see each other in April, and visit one of the two final venues we picked out.
I refuse to hire a wedding planner do to the fact that we are both AD and that we hardly even have the money to fly back and forth to venues we would like. I think it really is the fact that because we both have our own list of things to do that not being able to talk about it all the time is getting to us.
FI and I have done a bit of planning while he's deployed, it's made him feel like he's part of the process even though he's overseas. We've managed to find a venue I think we'll both like, but we're not going to book it until he gets home and we can go tour it together to make sure. I've also asked that he listen to songs to come up with first dance options, etc., stuff that he can help do while he's not physically here. We've only come close to arguing once and that was over the area that we wanted to do the wedding. His family has to drive 5 hours to get here, but we compromised in the fact that we will let them stay at our house for the weekend while we go stay in a hotel.
It's tough when you're not together, but it's not worth arguing about.
For us, we basically nailed down the huge things early: how much money are we spending, and who is invited (that second one has been a bit of a beast but for different reasons). We picked out a venue he liked. For almost everything else, I've basically picked something out, decided if it will indeed fit with everything else, agreed with myself that I'm not going to change it, and then gone to him and said "hey do you like this?" He's said yes every time: caterer, photographer, invites, etc. Our taste is close enough that I can get in his ballpark with very little difficulty.
I did not, however, consult him on the font for the invites, or whether we were going to do labels for the return addresses, or what kind of stamps we would use, or what color the chair covers were going to be, or what kind of flowers we were going to have. He doesn't care that much, and it means that we can have real conversations when we are together instead of some dumb wedding thing, and that I don't have to wait on him to get back to me on every detail before I can proceed.
Basically: one person should do all the vendor contacts, probably the person that is more excited about wedding planning (so in this instance, you), or you are going to be super annoyed when someone doesn't get back to him, and so he doesn't get back to you, and then nothing happens. And we have found it easier on most things to just have me make the decisions, and him confirm they are fine. Everything I pay for goes in the Google Doc for our wedding budget which we share. Your fiancé probably doesn't care that much if there are suspenders or not.