Stay Focused on What Matters: Required Reading for When You’re Planning Your Wedding
Planning a DC wedding? Here are my handpicked wedding planning books & blogs—that I know will help you feel prepared, confident, and genuinely excited for your big day.
A Practical Wedding Planner by Meg Keene
The most valuable wedding planning advice I’ve ever heard in my decade as a wedding photographer comes from the first chapter of A Practical Wedding Planner, by Meg Keene:
“When the seating charts are in the trash and your wedding decor is packed away, what emotions do you want to remember?… Once you’ve done the work of figuring out what you want your wedding to feel like… you and your partner try to create a joint list of top three wedding planning priorities—that will help you figure out what makes a wedding feel like a wedding to each of you… As you get lost in the weeds of “This costs what?” and “Your mom insists we have that??” you can revisit your original list to make sure you’re focused on the things that actually matter.”
While your list doesn’t need to be limited to three, identifying a small handful of priorities—whether it’s food, music, guest experience, venue, flowers, attire, transportation, or anything else—serves as a valuable guide throughout the wedding planning process. Having these priorities in mind helps ensure that your wedding reflects what truly matters most to you.
It’s also important to note that popular wedding budget templates, like those from The Knot, often don’t align with real-world pricing, or the most common inspiration photos couples see online. Rather than relying on generalized budget percentages for each vendor, this approach allows you to be intentional—allocating more resources to the aspects that mean the most to you while consciously scaling back in other areas.
Many couples have shared with me that once they made a clear decision about where photography ranked in their priorities, it made their entire planning process easier. Knowing whether photography was an area to invest in or save on helped them focus their search and find a photographer who truly fit their vision and budget.
Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give
At some juncture in your wedding planning, practical advice in the DIY or instructional style won’t be what you’re looking for. When you’re tired of wedding planning or just wishing you could focus on being married, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, by Ada Calhoun, is where I advise you turn.
Seven essays on marriage, strung together as a memoir, this easy-to-tear-through read that gives an unvarnished—but deeply funny and loving—inside look at the author’s own marriage. It is an expansion of Calhoun’s original 2015 essay by the same name in the New York Times’ Modern Love column:
He and I married young for our urban friend group — in our late 20s — and now, in our late 30s, we find ourselves attending the weddings of peers. My husband of 11 years and I sit at these weddings listening to our in-thrall friends describe all the ways in which they will excel at being married.
“I will always be your best friend,” they say, reading from wrinkled pieces of paper held in shaking hands. “I will never let you down.”
I clap along with everyone else; I love weddings. Still, there is so much I want to say.
I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you’ll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, “It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.”
In my own 2022 wedding to my husband, we chose three readings for loved ones to share at our ceremony. While perhaps deeply untraditional, the page and a half or so that I had my college best friend read aloud from Calhoun’s memoirs is still among my most vivid memories of our wedding day. Someday I will have those pages—annotated in pencil by my own hand—framed and hung alongside the wedding portrait that hangs in our hallway.
Calhoun’s words are an invaluable reminder as you embark upon your wedding planning that marriage “isn’t a happy ending, but rather an opening scene.”
