Josh Withers · Wedding Planning · 2 min read
You'll never have the perfect wedding
Waiting for a couple this afternoon, I feel down an Internet rabbit hole of wedding industry websites.
I’ll proofread and edit this article using Australian English spelling and conventions. Here’s the corrected version:
I’m reading through so many different wedding blogs and wedding vendor websites, and this one word featured so much more prominently than any others: perfect.
- Perfect day
- The perfect wedding!
- Your perfect day
- Plan your one perfect day
I’m not sure whose fault this is.
It could be that life really throws people curveballs and it would be lovely, a romantic notion if you like, to enjoy at least one perfect day, making it the bride and groom’s fault. Or maybe the wedding industry is taking its cues from the health and wellbeing industry and is letting you know that your life could be a whole lot better, so let us help. Either way, there’s a problem with the perfect day being perfect.
The problem with perfect is that perfection is an unreachable level of satisfaction. You’ll never achieve it, and if you’re expecting it, you’ll be disappointed. Unless your whole wedding is held in a robot-controlled or computer-simulated world, where uncles don’t get drunk and guests don’t turn up late, then you’re going to be in trouble. Celebrants get caught in traffic and photographers miss some shots. Venues miss cobwebs and stylists—well, stylists are perfectionists, but the rest of us are going to have problems.
Just this week I talked to a bride and groom, and despite all of us double-checking everything both times we met and looked at paperwork, I had made an error in the marriage paperwork. I wrote a letter to the government letting them know I made an error, a typo. And then in that letter, I made another typo, because of course the universe needed to prove how human (read: stupid) I was this past Friday. You might think I’m a super-celebrant (please don’t think that) but I’m just human.
And everyone else at your wedding is human, unless you’re inviting AI.
Of course, with all that said, there is hope, and Britt can vouch for me on this point: I personally lose sleep, work so hard, and go crazy in my endeavour to do the best job possible for my brides and grooms. And I’ve got a bunch of friends who do the same—feel free to reach out for a personalised recommendation.
But please don’t expect perfection; you’re only going to be let down by someone, and I hope to God it’s not me!
