1) been more inclusive with our invite list
2) hired a videographer
i want to share my regrets because i could only learn these after the fact. if i could change these two aspects to my wedding day, i would.
invite list
initially, i wanted a very small wedding. i'm talking in the order of 20 people or so total. this would've meant we would've had to exclude a lot of people we care about. we "tried it on" for size and it didn't sit right in our guts. so after we made our initial all-inclusive list, we kept narrowing it down over and over until we could get our total count down to approximately 100 guests.
unfortunately, i held onto "100" as some magic number that would keep things "intimate." i'm not sure what i was thinking because there is no magic number.
email invites were sent and while we received responses, we calibrated our invite list. it was only a few weeks before the wedding when i started to feel more flexible about who came. my spirit of exclusivity changed to a spirit of inclusivity. i wanted more and more people to be a part of such a special day.
but at the same time that my attitude changed, we were also getting very close to the date. i felt bad about inviting people so late in the game. i was afraid it would communicate that i was only inviting someone because a last minute spot opened up, but they weren't on my "A-list." so instead of just being courageous, i decided not to invite the people i had a change of heart about.
i wish i had been honest and brave.
fortunately, i had the opportunity to reconnect with one of my friends after the wedding and before we moved out of california. it was so good to catch up and learn what he'd been up to since he got married earlier in the year (a wedding i was invited to and had attended). my heart hurt that he was someone i didn't invite. so at the end of our conversation, i told him i was sorry that i didn't invite him. i told him that i wish he had been there to participate. i meant it.
videography
it didn't even need to be amazing videography, i would've been happy to have my iphone recording it.
when we got engaged, samuel asked what i thought about hiring a videographer. i told him i didn't care to have one. "as long as we have some good photos, it's fine. i don't want to spend money on it." :-\
i wish i had revisited this topic along the way. since our whole wedding day turned out to be something neither of us ever expected, something more meaningful than what i had imagined...we wish badly that we had it filmed. i wish i could watch mary, alice, don, and heather speaking, to watch the emotions shared between samuel and i, to laugh when i spoke embarrassingly, to catch glimpses of our beloved guests enjoying themselves... all those moments that i couldn't be a part of or was too overwhelmed with emotion to receive fully, i wish i could re-live the day through video.
i'm also saddened that we won't have something to show our kids one day.
do you have any regrets from planning your own wedding? what are yours?
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for me, i wish i had been more exclusive. there were people i felt bullied, by my father, into inviting. we had about 35 people and i would've been more than happy to halve that list.
ReplyDeletei also wish i had told my family to not bring their cameras. we had hired a professional photographer, because i wanted candids, not poses. i spent a lot of my time that night posing when all i wanted to do was breath, hang out, eat, kiss my husband, and not having to be "on".
it's so funny how there's spectrums of desires for a wedding day. a lot of shoulds, oughts, and obligations & a lot of people. it's tough to sift through all that and make decisions that are aligned with your values ... and to get others to comply. lol. oh, the impossibility of controlling people!
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