Congratulations. Now slow down. The most useful thing you can do in the first six weeks is almost nothing — and the very few specific things we are about to walk through.
The instinct, the moment you are engaged, is to start booking. The Pinterest board appears. The spreadsheets arrive. Friends ask if you have a date yet. The pressure to make decisions immediately is real and almost always wrong.
Here is what we tell couples to do in the first six weeks.
Week one. Tell people.
Call the people who would be hurt to learn it on social media. In order. Be in no rush to post.
Week two. Have one big conversation.
The two of you alone. Three questions. How big is this wedding. What kind of vibe. What is the absolute ceiling on the budget. You will revise all three of these. But the first answers tell you a lot.
Week three. Talk to the people writing the checks.
If your families are contributing, get clarity on the number before you fall in love with anything. This is the most uncomfortable conversation of the entire engagement and the one most worth having early. Everything downstream of "the budget" gets easier when you know what the budget is.
The pressure to make decisions immediately is real, and almost always wrong.
Weeks four & five. Hire a planner.
We are biased. We are also right. A planner brought in early saves you money, time, and an enormous amount of stress. They also help you make the next set of decisions — venue, date, vendors — in the right order, which matters more than you would think.
Week six. Set a date and a place.
Now. After you have the conversations above. Not before. The venue and the date are the two decisions everything else flows from, and they are very hard to undo. Make them last, not first.
The things that can wait.
- The dress
- The color palette
- The save-the-dates
- The florist, photographer, band, caterer
- The wedding website
- Anything on Pinterest
All of these decisions become better when the first six weeks are spent on the right foundations. Plan in the right order. The wedding gets easier from there.