The First Dance, why our name

I have been smiling every day this week as I notice we have "stalkers" trying to figure out why and how we are ranked #1 for "The first dance" on all search engines. I know this because the URL is a website to find "keywords" for websites that rank higher than you, though for those of you who know anything about websites, keywords are only a small part of the equation of search engine optimization.

In any event, our name is both wonderful and confusing. The wedding world is full of thousands of names with the word "wedding", "wed" and all sorts of other combinations in them so we knew it would be challenging to use those words. We were talking with a branding expert who was mentioning "the tango" which locally is a dating service I think? And it just struck me like lightening: The First Dance!

My dad, the marriage therapist, loves the name because dancing is THE metaphor for family systems theory - the conceptual understanding behind marriage and family counseling (which got its origins in the 1950's when treating individuals while ignoring the broader system they're part of - their family, their marriage, their jobs, their school) showed a weakeness in the treatment of the individual.

Nanny 911 or Super Nanny are a good examples of familiy systems theory. If the nanny were to simply show up, "teach the kids how to behave", treating them as the sole problem, then when she left the parents would return to their patterns and behaviors as would the kids. The show is about the FAMILY SYSTEM and how everyone interacts with everyone else. Everyone has to get up, move, change and relate to everyone else in a new way.

So it is with dancing. One could argue the climax of the wedding reception is The First Dance. It's the beginning and the end. It's the final performance of the couple and yet it's the beginning of their marriage dance. Once their dance is over, while everyone else is watching, parents and others join in. The imagery is great especially considering the very people who stress you out are the ones you want watching you dance and dancing with you on this momentous moment of the wedding day.

Marriage is all about the dance of life. How you move, how the other moves, how you work together, what happens when you don't, what happens when you're not moving to the same beat. Marriage is hard work and we love the wedding trend of The First Dance becoming a way for couples to take dance lessons to learn new skills. It's a fabulous date night and is one of those few things that requires both of you in wedding planning.

So here is to all of us -married or engaged, to keep on dancing beyond the first dance.

Ode to wedding coordinators!

We are members of the oldest, largest wedding planning association in the nation (though they have coordinators across the planet). It's called the Association of Bridal Consultants and there are over 4,000 members.

We are excited about networking with more of them and sharing our wisdom so they can help you, the engaged couple. There are many reasons to hire a wedding coordinator.

Wedding coordinators:
KNOW VENDORS. They know vendors more than even the average bride who might like them. The wedding coordinators know who is reliable, who is reasonable in price and what you can expect. They may also know which vendors work well TOGETHER - an overlooked but very important part of the wedding day!

Wedding Coordinators know the flow. Since almost nobody has planned such a large event, or ever will again, many weddings lack a good flow. This often results in discomfort for the guests and a feeling of confusion in the wedding. How many of you have tried to figure out when they're cutting the cake so you don't miss it but you REALLY HAVE TO USE THE RESTROOM? Or don't know where to go after the ceremony - wait around, leave right away? And when you show up at the reception, what do you do - find a table, wait? Flow is crucial to hospitality.

The devil is in the details. Wedding coordinators are experts at this! They can also tell you which details are not as important as you might think.

"What do others do?" While we don't think everyone should be doing the comparison game it is very useful to know what is normal and what isn't.

A bride should not "work" on her wedding day. The day of is full of amazing details, tons of work, a lot of coordination and the last thing you should have to do is MANAGE ALL THAT!

Unlike popular myth, wedding coordinators are not always expensive and are often going to save you more money than their fees. I also think they can save more sanity than any "money saved" is worth!

Two cheers for wedding coordinators! And another thing - they can be hired for an hourly consultation to go over your flow, they can be hired for the planning part or even just for the day!

What I hate about wedding budget advice

If you haven't yet seen the advice, it's easy to find. "How to save $1,000 or more on the wedding of your dreams." There are entire budget bride books out there and almost all magazines, each issue, have tips and tricks on how to save money.

In my opinion what most lack are the reason we even NEED to find ways to shore up our budget: everything is so tantilizing and feels so necessary that it feels impossible to actually reduce our wants, needs and desires on The Biggest Day Of Our Lives (or so we're lead to believe.)

I am not putting down weddings as being the biggest day in some peoples lives. We all have different notions of "the perfect day" and by all means the wedding is certaintly worthy of being the number one day. But for some of us it's a great day but not even in our top five great days. The reasons are plentiful - we have different personalities, different life experiences, we're different ages when we marry, and our families are all different. Those of us blessed with wonderful families are more likely to have all positive notions of our wedding compared to those of us with pretty toxic families. Duh, right.

So back to the budget advice. If we're being sold every day, online, in magazines, by vendors and the portfolios of their craft/services, plus we watch TV and see movies - the last thing we want is to do something nobody does - get married on a Wednesday, get married in the morning and avoid the whole food/funthing. It's not even about comparing yourself to others - though there is a component of that in each of us. It's about feeling like you deserve as great a day as anyone else and to take second fiddle just seems ridiculous for this, the one day of your life that is worthy of being as great as anyone elses big day.

What are we then to do? Elegant Bride interviewed us a while ago for an upcoming article on wedding stress and one story I shared was about our decision on where to have our reception. If MONEY were no object and we didn't have to consider our GUESTS - my husband and I are definitely urban and into the ambiance of a place. We would have chosen a swank arts and craft style restaurant with dark wood, amazing lighting, and beatiful decorations. We would have loved every moment of being in that environment and our guests would have memories forever.

But. There is always a but!

Our guests were mostly from out of town, many rural, and even some in town guests (like my oldest friend from elementary school) were very stressed out about driving in the city- let alone downtown. It stressed ME out thinking of them stressed out for 15 months before our wedding date knowing they would be put to the test with panic attacks, fighting in the car with their spouse trying to figure out where to go, and ultimately not REMOTELY feeling comfortable in what they might perceive as as very uptight, snotty environment.

So we ultimately chose the church basement. And while we were OK with that we got bad news - everything had to be cleaned up and locked by 11pm.

Ah!!! Not only were we not getting our swank environment but our night owl couplehood wouldn't even get to experience the full evening with our wedding guests.

But back to why we chose the church in the first place - guests would be extremely comfortable, it would save time in transportation between locations, save guests money not having to pay for parking, and we would have a more relaxed day allaround. (And we'd save a lot of money, too!)

Ultimately then we had a departure of 9:30pm and I'm not just saying this, it was a great time to leave. I had barely slept the night before, up early, lots of activity and people the days prior, wedding started at 5 and we had plenty of time to see everyone and still enjoy decompressing back at our hotel. While we had our friends there we also had a lot of older folks who were so relieved that we had "reception cards" outlining the entire evening. This gave them notice that at 7:30pm we would be cutting the cake. Everyone stayed for that and about half the people left. The rest of the people knew WHEN the end was and 9:30 was a very reasonable time to stay around (verus if we left at midnite we would have had few guests left.) This basically meant we had a wonderful send off with all our loved ones around us and they were able to get a good nites rest and some saw us the next day for the post-wedding brunch.

In my case we made a huge decision to save on the reception *location* which actually gave us room to bring in our own booze, have a live jazz band, great invitations, better photography, etc. We didn't feel like we were having a lesser wedding. In fact we had more for less because of one big decision. And the artwork displayed was gorgeous - guests felt like they were in a museum!

It all comes down to values and WHY you want what you do. Even then what you want and what makes sense can be two very different things. Our perfect day in a downtown restaurant would have been a stressful time for many of our guests - both in getting there, leaving but also not feeling comfortable in that setting. So it worked out that we not only saved on our wedding budget but we were able to use that money for other elements that mattered a lot to us - music, photography and setting a tone that we cared about our guests comfort.

Wedding advice makes me laugh

I was surfing the web and ran across a list of officiants (we're hoping to get a good list going on our site since many couples don't have a minister to marry them). Just like every other aspect of wedding planning, the expert advice was: officiants are the most important part of your wedding. Have you noticed EVERY wedding vendor has a great ability to say how they have the most important part in your wedding day? I certaintly don't blame them for loving their craft and indeed most of us have the requisit flowers, cake, food, officiant of some kind, etc. It's more about how they spin the argument/sales pitch that makes me chuckle.

The logic starts out something like this:

The average wedding costs [insert a dollar amount from $19,000-$27,000] and [insert vendor category] should be [insert a percentage from 1-40%] of your budget. You will get what you pay for so don't necessarily book the cheapest option. Afterall, if you are spending [huge wedding budget] you certaintly don't want to skimp on [insert vendor category.] Traditional wedding etiquette says you should have [insert details on the category] but many couples are now [insert a much more expensive, but more trendy way of doing things.]

I know from colleagues how challenging it is for wedding magazines because each vendor they work with believes they are the MOST important part of the day and as such need to be heavily pampered with compliments and head nodding. And I know from networking with and from my own wedding planning that each vendor loves what they do and can spin you into an expensive flurry of options that you simply can't resist saying no to! It isn't that they're trying to rip you off. They are just extremely passionate about what they do and their worldview centers around their craft.

Even when you know for sure what you want, or don't want, the pressures are great. Sometimes the pressures are internal - you thought you didn't care about wedding cake and then you see the most gorgeous cake in a magazine ad or on a website and you can't stop thinking about it! Othertimes the pressures are external - your groom is a tech wizard and requires the top photographer and videographer because of their high-end equipment, your mother has raised you with fantasizes about your wedding day that conflict with yours, or the most common that most of us face:

The external pressure of MONEY. Money has an amazing way of forcing us to reassess what is important and necessary. That gorgeous cake turns out to be $2,000 and you had budgeted $500? Where can you scrimp $1500 from your budget? You can't? Hm, is the cake really worth it? You say you'll use your year end bonus to make up the difference. Is that really what you want and what your groom wants? Will you really not regret that decision in a year or two when your furnace breaks down and you're in the hole $1500?

The entire book we wrote, Take Back Your Wedding: Managing the People Stress of Wedding Planning is really about helping you get centered. Centering yourself in what is important to you and why (values, not wishes), grounding yourself with your fiance(e) and how you will work together in this wedding planning process, and what you value around family and your community. Sometimes a seemingly unrelated value smacks you upside the head and answers your dilemma. That cake isn't about cake, it's about comparisons with your friends who are having splashy wedding cake designs. You take a new look at what you're planning, make some small changes to your choices, and voila, you stop obsessing over other peoples wedding plans. You haven't spent an extra $1500 and in fact you're alligning even more with your values than had you just gone with the expensive cake. You can honestly compliment your friends cakes while secretly being at peace with your less expensive but equally tasty one.

To invite kids or not invite kids: the age old question...

What do you do when your vision of the wedding doesn't include little ones crying, fussying, breaking things and generally throwing fits at your Perfect Day?

The problem can be biggest on either extreme - those who only have a small handful of children (you are young, your friends aren't having babies yet and all the other kids in the family are plenty old not to be stressed out) or those with massive children in the family or among friends. My brother got married this past summer at age 34 so there were lots of kids from their friends (and me!) I joked that he should have gotten married a lot earlier because it was a total pain to fly with a two year old and 3 month old cross country! :-)

I am of several minds about this topic and ultimately there is no flat answer for what you should do. But as a parent now I have a new take on the matter which I will discuss later. These are my quick impressions of the discussions people have on whether to invite children or not. I invite YOU to share your thoughts by registering at www.thefirstdance.com and "talk with us/share your story" where your answers will be stored rather than just sitting in an email. I am one of the few, if only, wedding websites where you can register and have zero concern about getting spammed by anyone! We don't sell, distribute, or in any way do a thing with your information.

Here are the top stressors around kids, in no particular order:

Time of the wedding
Let's be realistic. If most kids are in bed no later than 8:30 (mine go to bed at 7pm) it can be challenging to have an evening wedding where a percentage of your guests will be staying up well past their bedtime. Then again, should you really alter your entire wedding to accomodate little ones who may not even remember they were at your wedding and certaintly wouldn't care if they weren't there?

Money, money, money
While most kids under 5 eat free with most caterers, you are still having to fill seats which are on tables which are decorated, plated, "wedding favored", in a reception space that costs a lot per square foot to rent. If you're nice you may actually provide more goodies just for the kids which cost money. And if money is tight it can be very hard to justify inviting toddlers who don't know they exist over, say, your really good friends from college.

Distruption or attention - detracting
Even the least bridezilla among us certaintly want to be the focus of attention on the big day. There is nothing worse than imaging "You may kiss the bride" being said as baby cousin Charlie screams like a wild hyena! It not only detracts from the moment you're in, the feeling your guests are experiencing in that moment, the video you're capturing of this moment, but it also can be very embarassing for the parents of the kid who will forever remember being "the ones who ruined your day."

Location of the reception
Even if you love kids, some of us get married in really unusual places - along cliffs, in art museums, in small historic mansions. Basically we get married or have wedding receptions in places that are about as unkid friendly as you can get! Again it can be really hard to forgo that perfect spot just because you have a few rugrats who "should" be part of the day.

So before I share my thoughts I invite you to share what your decision process was, or what your current dilemas are around this topic. All answers will be held in confidence and no identifying information will be shared.