Getting Rid Of The Pre-Wedding Stress

In our blog last month, we wrote about how the new year is a great time to really focus on what’s important, and how those lessons are relevant for wedding planning too. The team here at Coombe Lodge, our stunning country wedding venue near Bristol, absolutely love working with all of our clients as they get ready for their big day, but one thing that continues to make us sad is the fact that so many people find wedding planning stressful. It can really take it out of you, often regardless of how much help you have readily available.

So we wanted this blog to be a little bit of TLC for you. A helpful friend if you like, to give you a few little tips as you embark upon planning one of the most important and memorable days of your life. Here goes:

1. Your Guests Are There For You

This is often overlooked but is the one thing that we can confidently, hand on heart, say is absolutely true. Your guests are there to support you, and really all that matters to them is that you are happy and have a wonderful day. If you haven’t got around to making those 100 handmade favours that you’d planned to, it really doesn’t matter. If you and your partner didn’t quite get to grips with your ‘first dance’ lessons, it doesn’t matter. The more relaxed you both are, the more relaxed your guests will be and they’ll have a wonderful time as long as you do.

2. Take Some Time Out

This one is really important. Often, the best dates in some venues can get booked up far in advance. Here at Coombe Lodge we often find summer Saturdays can get booked up to two years in advance. This means that you could be planning and preparing for your wedding for over a year. That’s a long time to be focusing on something and so one piece of advice that we would give couples is to take some time out from it all if you can. Once you’ve got the big things booked, like the venue, caterers (not an issue here as we have our own in-house kitchen team), entertainment and photographer, be rest assured that the rest will slot in to place. Why not start a yoga class, or book a night or two away somewhere, just the two of you? Why not enjoy the engagement, and make the most of the lead up to this really magical day?

3. Something Will Go Wrong

We pride ourselves on being expert wedding planners, and at Coombe Lodge we have a full team in place here with years of wedding planning experience. So we shouldn’t say that something will go wrong, and hopefully it won’t! But quite often, a slip up does happen. Great Uncle Clive might get lost. Your mum might wear the same outfit as somebody else. It might rain even though the weather forecast looked great. Somebody might tread on your veil. Your old pal might drink too much champagne and fall over. It’s really important to get things into perspective and to understand that as long as the two of you are having an amazing day, nothing else really matters. And from talking to many of our couples after their wedding day, we now understand that often it’s these slip ups that keep people talking, and laughing about the occasion in months and years to come. So go with it, and be prepared to adapt as the day unfolds.

4. Share The Load

So often we see one person taking on the majority of the planning. They might have looked forward to this day and planned it in their head since way before the proposal, so it’s perfectly normal that they should probably want to take control. But this can lead to stress, and so even if your other half doesn’t seem that bothered by the minute details, share it with them anyway. Keep talking. We all know that bottling things up often makes them a lot harder to deal with, so talk about your decisions to anyone who will listen. And feel free to offload some jobs too – everybody loves being trusted enough to be asked and it’s a really nice thing to get your friends and family involved too.



5. Be Comfortable

This is a tricky one. By this we mean, choose your dress bearing in mind that you’ll be wearing it all day. Choose it based upon the fact that you’re likely to be sitting, standing, walking and dancing, all for fairly long periods of time. With men, bear in mind that three piece suits can get hot and itchy in baking July sunshine. The more comfortable the happy couple is, the more comfortable their guests will be so as you choose your outfits, it’s worth bearing these things in mind.