Don’t Forget To Plan Your Marriage

Wedding planning can take months or a year before the bride walks down the aisle to begin her life with her fiancé. There are hundreds of details to tend to for your special day in the spotlight. With all that intense planning, booking and scheduling, most engaged couples don’t give one thought to planning their marriage.

To start with, make sure you know why you are getting married. Always wanting to get married is a poor reason to do it. Both of you should write an honest list of the good and bad elements of your relationship and then talk about them with each other to see if changes or adjustments need to be made. Just make sure that list stays focused on the dynamics of your relationship with each other and doesn’t become a personal attack on the person.

One mistake a lot of people make when they agree to marry is to use it to run away from problems or unpleasant surroundings or employment. Marriage shouldn’t be an escape from anything, but a promise of a loving and future life together. Both of you have to be excited and anticipating a wonderful life together. If either one of you has to be talked into getting married, call it off.

It’s not easy to predict what your future together will be, but a careful consideration of your partner’s parents, including how they treat each other and their attitudes, will tell you a lot about how your partner might treat you later. If you know your fiance’s past relationships were stormy and less than loving, that might be a predictor of future behavior.

Why do you need to do all this discussing about matters that don’t have anything to do with your wedding day and reception? One day in your live, as beautiful as it might be, will not define the next 50 years or whether or not you will be happy together. Take some time before you get too buried in wedding details to discuss the rest of your life with your partner. If you have to, get away from everybody for a weekend, or several weekends if necessary.

Your topics of discussion will be how you both plan on handling life’s events as you live out your life. When you are finished, you should have a working agreement on whether or not you want children, methods of discipline and a fair division of labour. Gone are the days when the husband was the sole breadwinner for the family and the working wife took care of everything else.

Many married couples both work fulltime jobs and a husband expecting his wife to come home from work and take care of everything else in their life is just not going to work. Actually it only worked in TV sitcoms from the 1950s.

Clear agreements have to be defined about money, who will spend it and how. Any wide gap in financial focus will derail a marriage in a heartbeat. Saving for the future, children’s education and family vacations has to be a joint venture in a successful marriage.

Other possible points of disagreement can be religion, career changes, retirement, where you are going to live and your relationships with both sets of in-laws. If you both cannot agree on the importance of planning these major events in your future life, you might need to think about your marriage. If there’s no middle ground, no give and take, you won’t get along or be happy.

One thing that sneaks up on engaged couples is the actual cost of being married. If your marriage means giving up your career you’ve spent years developing or moving far away from your friends and family, your future with your partner might not be that happy. If this is your situation, think very carefully about it.

These recommended discussions before you get married are not meant to discourage you from getting married. They are meant, however, to get you to think beyond the excitement of your wedding and to think about planning your future.

For more wedding tips and advice, as well as a full directory of wedding suppliers in Surrey, visit Surrey Weddings

What’s In A Name?

When you get married everyone expects you to change your last name to your husband’s last name. While it is not a requirement, it certainly is expected by almost everyone: your fiance, both sets of parents and probably most of your friends.

You might think that this emerging decision to keep your maiden name after marriage is a product of the 21st century. Actually, the first recorded incident of keeping a maiden name after marriage was over 150 years ago when Lucy Stone refused to take her husband’s name when she married him in 1855. Her stand for individual women’s rights gave birth to the Lucy Stone League, which still exists today.

For more info: http://www.lucystoneleague.org/lucy.html

With some women, this is a very hot issue and several forums have come out of that emotional struggle some women have over changing their names. A Google search will provide pages of information for you. Quite a few wedding sites have articles or forums to investigate.

When it becomes common knowledge that you are not going to change your name after marriage, you might be surprised by the negative comments from those you considered enlightened friends. Most, but not all, women today are liberated enough to like who they are and do not require merging their identity with another’s in order to marry.

Some of those comments might be similar to these: “I thought you loved this guy” or “If you love him, you should be proud to bear his name.” Loving someone does not require a name change to prove it. In fact, their comments might be a reflection of some of their own unspoken doubts or insecurities.

On the flip side, there will be some that are appalled that you DID take your husband’s name. “You are so liberated, I cannot believe you took his name and abandoned your own identity. What’s happened to you?” You might decide to hyphenate your two names and someone will find another way to condemn your decisions. Just shrug it off and remember that this personal decision is yours to make and not anyone else’s.

There are many valid reasons women choose to keep their maiden name after marriage. One of the major ones is the feeling that your identity is all tied up in the name you were born with and have identified with for your entire life. That’s a pretty strong reason to not change your name. To some, it will feel like a total abandonment of who you are and that might be psychologically impossible to do.
Those with strong family ties might not be willing to toss their ancestry aside so easily by changing their name. A personal connection to a family name might be a deep connection to the entire history of her family’s ancestral ties.

If you are a professional with a reputation built up over the years, it might be career suicide to change your name and lose the recognition you need to protect. Of course, you can use both names, your professional one and your married name socially. If your career involves politics or a public presence, you might make a mistake if you lose the value you’ve built up for your maiden name.

To some, changing your name to your husband’s will feel like an ancient patriarchal flashback to a time when men owned the women in their lives. That’s sure to spark some fireworks with today’s women.

There are several solutions to this dilemma. You can take your husband’s name and replace your middle name with your family name. You can hyphenate your name with both of your surnames. And your husband can change his name to your maiden name. Some do.

Consider giving your maiden name to all your children as their middle name. That way, their connection to three families, yours, his and the one you created with your marriage, stays intact.

For more wedding tips and advice, as well as a full directory of wedding suppliers in Surrey, visit Surrey Weddings

Little Things Can Make Or Break Your Wedding

Every bride-to-be has a vision in her mind of a perfect wedding with no hitches to ruin that vision. There are many little details that can either create the perfect wedding or make it stressful to the wedding party or the guests.

When you have been planning your wedding for months, the big things will probably be just fine. You will walk down the aisle and marry your handsome fiance. Your reception will have all the trappings you envisioned, like good music, dancing, great food and happy guests.

In order to make the entire event something special, you need to add little touches of your own personality or creativity to what could be a sterile event. To make it really special, include your groom’s interests or personality in the special touches you are planning too. Good politics might suggest that you also include both mothers to help you create your special touches.

To begin with, don’t leave necessary items to chance or assume that they come naturally with some of your catered deliveries. It would be a good idea to get your maid of honour involved in checking and double checking the availability of necessary utensils, matches for lighting candles, a bottle opener for the wine, enough wine glasses for all your guests, sufficient ice for cool drinks for the length of your reception, etc. Catering companies can be sloppy, too.

Another good idea is to have a bag with tape, needle and thread for emergency repairs, antacids, Tylenol, Alka-Seltzer tablets, a few Band-Aids and an antiseptic. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few sweets or a couple of simple toys to entertain a too-tired child if any are going to be in attendance. Enlist your mothers or your maid of honour.

Your wedding favours for your guests do not have to be the traditional favours given at most wedding receptions. Consider, instead, a CD of the romantic music your and your husband played or danced to while you were courting. Put your pictures and the date of your wedding on the CD label.

Another special favour would be a DVD or PowerPoint presentation of pictures of both of you from childhood to now. Include some of your courting days and the same music suggested above. Both mothers would probably be happy to provide the old family album for really personal photos to share with your guests. It can all be done on your computer.

Disposable cameras on the reception tables will give you a photographic memory of events and expressions you will not notice with all the attention being paid to both of you at the reception. A picture of your 4-year-old nephew sneaking a taste of the frosting on the wedding cake or two tots dancing with each other in the middle of the adults will be priceless later. Have a basket near the door so people can drop off the cameras as they leave.

One way to entertain your guests before you arrive at the reception is to have a quiz at each place setting on the tables with questions about both you and your groom. Provide a nice gift for the one who knew the most about both of you.

Granted, you will be overwhelmed with details during the last few days before your wedding. Have a quick meeting with your maid of honour and both mothers, even a few special friends, and divide the little details between them so you don’t have to worry about them at the last minute. Even the best planning can be derailed with a tiny oversight.

It’s the little things that make or break your wedding. They don’t have to break you.

For more wedding tips and advice, as well as a full directory of wedding suppliers in Surrey, visit Surrey Weddings