by Charlotte A. Cavatica

Created on: July 20, 2008

The saying "You've been to one wedding, you've been to them all" doesn't need to apply to you and there's no reason why it should! Your wedding day is all about you and your soon-to-be-spouse, individual people with your own personalities, styles, interests, histories and heritage. Investing some time into the planning stages can ensure that your wedding is as unique as the two of you are. Based on the emphatic and repeated feedback my husband and I have received about our own wedding, even now, 3 full years later, I can say with complete confidence that we succeeded in avoiding the bland, predictable hum drum of your typical, run-of-the-mill wedding. How did we do it? Simply by being ourselves and inviting our family and friends to the wedding that we ourselves would want to attend.

So many couples feel the pressure to make their day conform to fit the expectations of their families. Why? It's not their day, or their love that's being celebrated, it's yours. If you want the wedding of your dreams, you need to stand your ground and explain to those exerting the pressure that they had their opportunity to plan their own wedding (if they did), you would appreciate it if they would let you plan your own. If they never had a wedding - that's a totally different conversation - try to be understanding as they're most likely trying to live vicariously through you to do what they never did. Even still, be firm in insisting that you appreciate their help, but this is your wedding and the decisions are yours to make.

Because there are infinite possibilities in recommendations I could make based on the various elements you can include, remove, or tweak to serve your own purposes, I'm going to make this simple and just tell you the story of my own wedding. As you follow it, you will get an idea of the different elements we used and how we adjusted them to suit our own needs. How you tweak them for your own wedding is completely up to you. Just try to remember, it's a crazy, stressful time, but it should be fun too! You're planning the biggest celebration of your lives together thus far - try to keep that in perspective whenever you feel yourself getting overwhelmed.

My husband and I both have strong and deep Boston Irish-Catholic roots, so we certainly understood what would be expected of our wedding... a church, a priest and a full mass. We'd been to my husband's brother's and sister's weddings in the two years leading up to our own, so it was all too fresh in our memories

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