30 Years, 200 Weddings: The Biggest Mistake I Still See Couples Make
You'd think after thirty years and more than 200 weddings, the mistakes I see would have changed. They haven't, not really. There's one that shows up more than any other, across every budget, every style, every kind of couple — and it's not what most people expect.
It's not overspending. It's not a bad vendor. It's this: couples wait too long to decide what actually matters to them before they start planning.
Here's what that looks like in practice. A couple starts by looking at venues, or Pinterest boards, or what their friends did — before they've had the conversation about what they actually want their day to feel like, and what they're each willing to compromise on. So every decision after that becomes a negotiation from scratch, because there's no shared foundation to make it against.
I've watched couples spend months debating a guest list, a venue, a budget line — arguments that weren't really about the thing on the table. They were symptoms of never having agreed on priorities in the first place.
The fix is almost embarrassingly simple, and almost no one does it first: before you book anything, before you open a single vendor website, sit down together and answer two questions. What are the two or three things that matter most to both of us about this day? And what are we genuinely fine letting go of?
Couples who do this — even imperfectly — plan faster, argue less, and end up happier with the result. Not because they made better individual decisions, but because every decision after that had something to be measured against.
Fay's Tip: Write your answers down, separately, before comparing notes. You'll often be more aligned than you expect — and where you're not, you'll find out early, when it's cheap to compromise, instead of six months in when you've already paid a deposit.
If there's one piece of advice I'd want every couple to hear before anything else, it's this one. It's the first thing I walk through in the Wedding Cheat Sheet, because everything else genuinely gets easier once it's settled.