Lia's 3-pronged approach to planning a wedding, and not sweating the details

There are as many ways to get married as there are people in the world. The only thing that really matters is that you feel your wedding is yours, be it traditional with 7 bridesmaids and groomsmen, or a just the two of you on a beach in Hawaii. This is how we narrowed down our endless choices, left the details to others, and enjoyed the party of our lives.

1. Theme
If you have a wedding "theme", it really helps make decisions along the way for you. In our case, we wanted our wedding to express our personalities as individuals and as a couple. The final winner was "marine" -- symbolic ceremony at sea, party at a yacht club, boat-classy untraditional, international flavour, sustainable where possible, not too formal matchy-matchy. We made our wedding colours cobalt blue and white, we chose a font. Done and done.

Then whenever someone asked us about what colour flowers we wanted, or what the decorations should be, designing the save-the-dates and invitations and website and Facebook group, it was really easy to just say "Marine, cobalt blue, white, trebuchet" and then we backed off and let people do the rest for us (while retaining vito rights). Many things didn't match the theme, but that also made the wedding more us.

Your theme should only act as a tool to help make decisions, not as the omnipotent symbol of your wedding. Let go of your theme when it's not working for you -- for example, there are no blue flowers in September, they only bloom in early spring (so we had sustainable air plants in dry colours -- almost the anti-marine theme -- but beautiful and contrasting).

Another theme could be "random", or "I hate themes" or whatever, it just has to be you and enable detailed decisions without your involvement.

2. Prioritise and rank
What we did very early on was brainstorm priorities, and then rank them. For example:

• Above anything, our wedding is about bringing together all the cool people we love from around the world
• Intimate expression of ourselves that include wedding traditions that are true to us, rather than a traditional wedding checklist
• An experience worth flying from abroad for
• Chances for guests to meet each other and be familiar with each other before the actual wedding ceremony
• Free drinks, no one but Canadians thinks it's okay to pay for drinks at parties
• Nice food
• Matching rings vs. each of us really liking our own rings
• Vintage car to drop us off / pick us up
• Not too many speeches
• Etc.

And then ranking them right at the beginning really helped, both in terms of how to spend our money, but more importantly how to spend our organisation time.

1. Out-of-town guests-centred experience
2. Honour our families in our ceremony / speeches
3. Activities before and after wedding day
4. Free drinks during all activities
5. Fabulous dress
6. Fabulous family and ceremony photographs
7. etc.

Then when it came down to the hard decisions -- caterer, menu, venue -- it was really easy because we just looked at the ranking of our priorities. Example:

Out-of-town guests-centred experience = easy access to venue, venue in centre of city that showcases beautiful Vancouver views, boat trip, guest down time sitting on patio while taking family photographs, etc. To afford that we needed to give up having a photographer for the full day and night (thank God), and go with a different menu, etc.

In the end, our priorities were clear in our budget spending: most of our budget was spent on venue, boat and booze, a medium amount on dress, suit, photographer, rings, activities before and after wedding, and food, and little was spent on transportation (carshare car), cake (I prefer chocolate and pies to cake), flowers (wedding bouquets for the bride and maid of honour, corsages and boutonnieres for family and friends who helped with wedding), decorations (the view was enough!).

3. Keeping track of details
​We used this great template to organise the details of our wedding:
http://www.google.com/weddings/#/fill-in-the-blanks

There are lots of tabs to help you, just delete the ones you​ don't use (we only used about half of the tabs). But it's great for keeping all of the details recorded in one place, and then sharing the template with whomever needs access to it (we shared ours between each other, our emcee, mom, brother, sister, etc.). If the details are all organised in one place and shared with the right people, then you won't have to think about it on your wedding day.

The first thing we needed to do was decide where we were getting married and when. So we created a new tab in the template and inputted all of our key guests, and then put columns for "Amsterdam", "Vancouver" and "Destination wedding", and then put the likelihood that those key guests would be able to come to each of those options. In the end, "Vancouver" was the overwhelming winner, so we decided to have the wedding there (even though I preferred to get married in Amsterdam), and then when we discovered that Eid was landing on Labour Day weekend that year, the date revealed itself too.

Conclusions
Do whatever you need to do ahead of time so that at showtime you are totally present and available to enjoy the love.

For us, organising our decisions around our theme and setting priorities early on, and then having a centralised document to record and share the details meant that in the week leading up to the wedding we were totally mentally, emotionally and physically available to just enjoy everyone.