For every engaged couple, the months of preparation leading up to the wedding are without a doubt laced with stressful moments. You're constantly faced with major expenses coupled with an ever-shrinking budget.  You have to manage both your own wishes for the wedding and societal and familial expectations, not to mention that you both still have lives that must go on in the meantime. It is no wonder that it is so easy to become overwhelmed when planning a wedding, and who would blame you with everything that is going on? Simply put, planning a wedding is hard.

I think that people don't blame you for being overwhelmed when planning a wedding because they expect you to be! There is such a strong societal expectation for a wedding to be stressful, that we are almost predisposed to dread it rather than enjoy it. As a young man, being engaged brings with it a certain stigma in which everyone seems to feel bad for me (this may in part be because of the misleading stigma that women are supposed to drive their fiances crazy during the planning process). Whenever my coworkers ask about how the wedding planning is going, they adopt a look in their eyes that makes it seem as though they are staring at an injured puppy. The most frequent follow-up question I get is, "How stressed are you?" or "How much more do you have to do?" Even one of my bosses took me aside for some advice on making it through an engagement. As a result of hearing these stereotypes on a daily basis, it was hard not to view what should be a potential opportunity for growth and excitement, as a stressful burden.