It’s good to learn from our mistakes—but it’s even better to learn from the mistakes of others. So with that in mind, we asked five real brides to reveal their biggest wedding-planning blunders and what they’d do differently given the chance.
1. Not hiring a professional wedding planner. Callie says she trusted a family friend to make sure everything ran smoothly on their big day. “But she ended up bailing at the last minute,” says Callie, “which meant that instead of spending more time with our family and friends, everyone—including us—had to pitch in to make sure things got done when we should have all been enjoying time together.”
2. Assuming yours is the only event in town. When Colleen and her fiancé selected their wedding date, they didn’t consider what else might be happening in town on the big day. “It turned out there was a major convention was planned for the same weekend—with more than 20,000 attendees—and we could not get any room blocks for our guests,” she says. The couple swapped their wedding date in time to send out save-the-dates, “but it could have been a disaster,” Colleen says.
3. Not listening to your heart. Annie simply couldn’t decide whether a destination wedding was really the right move—even though she knew deep in her heart she craved getting married with crashing waves in the background. “I wasted a lot of time talking to local vendors, because I never found anything as amazing as the beachside vision I had in my mind,” she explains. In the end, she opted to go international. “If I had just listened to my heart,” she says, “I could have saved a lot of time and effort.”
4. Not ordering extra everything. Anna was trying to cut costs however she could—and that meant when her caterer suggested budgeting for an extra five to 10 meals for her sit-down dinner, she balked. “I thought, why would I pay for things I won’t use?” she says. “But when three guests showed up with uninvited plus-ones, I really wished I had listened.” Her caterer was able to whip something up on the fly to feed her extra guests, but Anna says it was stressful trying to squeeze them in at already full tables. “I should have ordered a few extra place settings and chairs too!” she says.
5. Trying to please everyone but yourself. When it came to planning everything from her engagement party to her bachelorette fete and how her venue should be decorated, Morgan made things easier by deferring to what her friends and family wanted. “But I started to see I was trying to please everyone at the expense of compromising what I wanted,” she says. “During the planning process, it became about what everyone else wanted and who they wanted to invite.” If she could do it over again, Morgan says, “I would stick to what I wanted and let others know ahead of time.”