This post is part one of my four-part series on wedding planning, perfectionism, and what really happens when the big day finally arrives. My hope is that these posts serve as both a peek behind the curtain of our Pacific Northwest wedding and a source of honesty and guidance for other brides navigating the stress, beauty, and contradictions of wedding planning.

Confessions of a Perfectionist Bride

I have a confession to make, and you’re not going to like it: My wedding wasn’t the happiest day of my life.

It was breathtaking, extraordinary, and unforgettable, yes. But it was also laced with exhaustion, anxiety, and pressure.

That doesn’t mean it failed. It means it was real.

Below is my story and how I processed this challenging realization after studying happiness for over a decade.

Why It’s Hard to Be Happy When You’re Planning a “Perfect Wedding”

When people talk about planning a wedding, they usually describe it as stressful, overwhelming, and expensive. So much time, money and thought goes into these events. Likely more than you’ve ever spent on any single event in your life. And events are different from projects, because they have a timebound culmination. There is one day to land it all. Everything has to come together - God, guests and weather willing. That’s not to even mention the social and psychological expectations that come with the event. So many people, when asked about their wedding weekend, describe it as “the happiest day of my life.”

I, someone who cares deeply about happiness and has studied its trappings for nearly a decade, was both wary of and excited by this promise. I seek happiness in so many realms, investing in so many tools; could my wedding unlock new levels of this golden feeling for me? Maybe…if I do it all perfectly, I thought.

I am a perfectionist, and I don't say that like you do in a job interview when asked your worst trait. It actually is one of my worst traits. I’m obsessed with control and having things go my way in my personal life, a fact which frequently puts me at odds with those I'm closest with (sorry, husband & vendors).

This is the type of perfectionist that I am: If I care about something, I am willing to spend hours, days, months researching the peak, optimal approach to achieving it, whether it’s:

obtaining a thing (like my wedding dress, which I sourced 2nd hand from Ireland after falling in love with it despite it being 4x my budget)
orchestrating an outcome (like my 10-part wedding weekend)
bringing a vision to life (like our monochrome floral & disco ball tent installation)

The hardest part here is that no one else can ever care this much. Thus, you will be constantly let down by the people you’re working with on any given project. It’s a painful way to live. So much so that my New Years resolution the last 2-3 years has been “work on my control issues.” I haven't found a great way to let go yet, though.

The Perfectionist Trap: Control, Expectations, and Exhaustion

Which brings me to my wedding. You add this unique concoction of volatile ingredients - perfectionism, expectations, pressure - and you get me, the month before my wedding up to the very day it was over, a beautiful, swirling, anxiety-riddled mess. I wanted every detail to go to plan. I wanted to stay on budget, which I’d planned so meticulously & negotiated at every turn. And with a (yes!) nearly 10-part wedding, where I cared about every part, there were a lot of details to manage & keep me up at night.

Why plan such an affair? A few reasons. Practically, we ended up with a Sunday wedding, due to the popularity of our venue, which meant we had a larger canvas of weekend to work with & fill. Second, it was fun! I love planning events and bringing people together, and I got to exercise so much creativity in thinking about the various events that would tell the unique story of Ty & I’s love. Finally, I like to impress. Despite working with a more modest budget than many of my peers, I wanted our wedding to feel unique, memorable, and special.

But wow, the number of logistical details this confluence of factors brought upon us. A single wedding day is bad enough. The mental load of a wedding weekend is untold. And it took its toll.

But let’s start from the beginning.

It’s not headline-making that weddings are stressful. But if I’m being honest, for me it was also thrilling. There was a stretch of time when I felt like I was living in a state of engagement so pure & consuming, some might call it mania. My brain was buzzing with ideas, my fingers couldn’t stop scrolling Instagram, and every spare moment I had was swallowed by spreadsheets, moodboards, and vendor emails.

On the one hand, it was intoxicating. I’ve written on this blog before about flow, that state of being so deeply engaged in what you’re doing that you lose track of time, feel energized rather than depleted, and experience a kind of flourishing that makes life feel richer. Planning my wedding often felt like that. I loved the creative exercise of it, the organizational challenge. For a time, I was in love with the planning process itself.

But here’s the other truth: what feels like flow can sometimes tip over into obsession. And that’s what happened to me. I stopped sleeping. My mind would come alive at three in the morning, cycling through options I hadn’t decided on yet. I would sit at my laptop, reviewing the same vendor options over and over, searching for just one more photographer, one more floral inspo photo, one more piece of information that would make me feel certain about my choices.

At the height of it, I spent two full months agonizing over our venue and then another two full months agonizing over our photographer. That’s four months of agonizing in the pain of indecision! I laugh about it now, but in the moment it didn’t feel funny. It felt urgent, as though if I picked the wrong venue or photographer, I might somehow ruin the entire wedding. The options never seemed to end, and neither did the indecision.

Choosing a Wedding Venue That Sets the Stage

One of the first big decisions in planning a wedding is the venue.

Nothing could have been more obvious than Hawaii. Ty and I had moved there six months into our relationship during the pandemic and lived for a year on the island of Oahu. Those first months were magical: new love set against a backdrop of ocean views, balmy nights, and the jagged green cliffs of the Kualoa mountains. It was one of the most special times in our relationship, and so when we started looking at venues, Hawaii felt like the natural choice.

We toured eight venues on the island. One of them, Kualoa Ranch, felt too perfect. It was twenty minutes from my grandparents’ house, overlooking the same ocean we’d lived beside, and backed by those surreal cliffs you’ve seen in Jurassic Park. We were so smitten that we called every day until we got a date on hold. We were within 24 hours of our signing deadline when we found out about a massive track tent they’d be installing the next year, a tent that couldn’t be removed and completely changed the vibe of the space. For me, it was a deal-breaker. I was crushed to let go of the Hawaii wedding dream.

That’s when the Pacific Northwest pulled us in. Not only is it the place I grew up, but one of the great stories in the lore of our relationship is that Ty’s parents - who originally hail from the Bay Area - moved five minutes down the street from my mom in Camas, WA two years into our relationship. We like to joke that our parents got engaged before us. To us, the PNW carries with it the symbolism of family, as well as the beauty of the outdoors. And when we stumbled across The Griffin House in Hood River, OR - arguably one of the more iconic wedding venues in the country - we realized that maybe this was the obvious answer all along.

When we signed with The Griffin House, we didn’t just get a Sunday wedding date: we got the chance to build a whole weekend around it. At first, I was hesitant…Sundays are unconventional for weddings, and I worried about asking guests to travel and take time off. But the venue sold us on the upside: with a Sunday date, we’d get to stretch out the experience. We’d welcome people Friday night, plan something fun Saturday, and then have our wedding Sunday, landing three full days of togetherness instead of just one. We were sold.

How We Built a Wedding Weekend in Hood River

We anchored the weekend at Skamania Lodge, the one true resort in the Columbia River Gorge. Rustic but regal, Skamania feels quintessentially Pacific Northwest, with towering evergreens, timbered interiors, and stunning views of the Columbia River. We’d been to enough resort weddings to know how special it is to have everyone under one roof, running into friends in the lobby, grabbing coffee together in the morning, and sharing one long weekend as a community.

From there, the weekend filled out easily. We planned a Saturday filled with Ty and I’s favorite things and the best that Hood River had to offer, including fitness, yoga, wine, music, great food, fruit picking, and insane views of Mount Hood and the Gorge. To round things out for those arriving early, we planned a small welcome party at Skamania for Friday evening. Our plan in full:

Friday Welcome Party: Easy, casual at Skamania. Drinks & bites on us. We budgeted for ~30 people.
Saturday “Tymania” @ Skamania: Ty has a long-standing obsession with fitness parks. Anywhere we travel, he finds one. Skamania happened to have a great one onsite, so he planned a light fitness competition to kick off the weekend.
Saturday Yoga on the Lawn: Yoga has been part of my life for over 15 years; Ty’s a more recent convert. My two best friends & maids of honor also happen to be yoga and sound healing instructors. They agreed to teach a class for us on Saturday morning, after Tymania.
Saturday Hood River Fruit Loop Excursion: In the afternoon, we’d board a party bus with 40 of our closest friends and tour around Hood River’s Fruit Loop, stopping at Grateful Vineyards for lunch among the vines, The Gorge White House for fruit picking and cider tasting, and Ferment Brewing for beers and views of the area’s iconic windsurfers.
Sunday Wedding: The crescendo! All hosted at The Griffin House, perched cliffside on the breathtaking Columbia River Gorge.

I wanted our guests to feel like they were stepping into a three-day love story that only we could have written. Every moment was intentional.

Designing a Wedding That Feels True to You

Once we had the bones of the weekend, it was time to design the big day. Ty and I knew from the beginning that we didn’t want a plug-and-play wedding. We wanted something that felt personal and creative, something that reflected our shared values.

It was so fun to reflect deeply on what makes Ty and I so drawn to one another. Was it our shared love of Bay Area hip hop and dancing? Or was it the umpteenth trip to Salt & Straw? Maybe the hundreds of question cards that brought us so close over our first year of dating and have kept the intellectual spark alive ever since? We used this reflection to anchor our design values for the event.

Ultimately, we landed on a three-part concept for the big day:

Pacific Northwest charm: A reflection of our shared love of the outdoors & commitment to our families.
Quiet luxury: A reflection of our shared design sensibilities & subtle nod to the life we want to build for ourselves.
Disco dance party: A reflection of how often we find ourselves dancing & laughing together, whether in the kitchen, at a private lesson, or a live show.

From there, all of our design decisions were able to flow from a coordinated perspective. The brief informed a heavy lean toward rich greens and browns, satin & vintage silver, a disco ball motif that carried through from our invitations to our welcome table to our dance floor. I compiled every bit of Instagram/Pinterest/website inspo I encountered into countless Google Slides of thematic moodboards, which I then used to help my vendors understand my vision.

We were so proud of planning such a unique set of activities, aligned with all that makes Ty and I come alive. We were both gratified and surprised when so many of our guests wanted to participate. It was all so easy to plan, to collect RSVPs for. It wasn’t until the last month before the wedding that rubber hit the road, and I became undone.

If you’ve been through it yourself, I’d love to hear: did your wedding feel like the happiest day of your life, or something more complicated? Leave a comment below so we can normalize the full spectrum of wedding experiences together.

This is part one of my four-part wedding reflection series. Don't forget to subscribe in order to get the full story, dropping weekly in September!