Enjoying Your Wedding When Everything Goes Completely Wrong

There is this archetype of the typical bride we have in modern society: she has been visualizing her perfect wedding day since she was five, and has had every minute detail planned out since the age of 13. For the past ten years she has been keeping a binder of colors, materials, photographs, business cards, and pamphlets so she can be ready to snap up a Perfect Wedding at a moment's notice (the moment some unfortunate man pulls out a ring), much in the same way someone snaps up a pop-up tent.

In real life, it doesn't work this way. Wedding season is here, along with its fun, its gaiety, and unfortunately, its disasters. Girls, it will be beautiful, it will be amazing, it will be unforgettable, but one thing it will not be is perfect.

Let me give you a few examples from the pages of my wedding scrapbook....

Thing that Can go Wrong number 1: You can lose a bridesmaid, possibly a maid of honor, and not in the sense that she will be lost on a camping expedition in Yosemite. One week before my wedding day, my maid of honor, a woman who had been one of my closest friends for 10 years, informed me by email that not only will she not be in my wedding, but she will never speak to me again. Not because of any terrible conflict between us, but because feelings of inadequacy that had been building up for years. I won't go into the gory details, but you might find yourself one wedding party member short, with absolutely no one that can fit into her dress.

Thing that Can go Wrong number 2: Almost as bad as number one, it can rain on your outdoor wedding. While the first problem is virtually unfixable, number 2 has some solutions. You can have the ceremony outdoors adjacent to indoor facilities, or have the option to move the entire ceremony site....or you can do an anti-rain dance. (This last one didn't work for me). My wedding was supposed to be on the front lawn of a beautiful old historic home, with flower petals raining down on us as we walked down the aisles beneath a pair of double rainbows. It didn't quite work that way. We had the wedding inside, which was second best, and afterwords danced in the rain. It was crowded, wet, and muddy, kind of like Woodstock, but also like Woodstock, it was incredible. Your dresses get dirty? That's what dry cleaning is for. Don't focus on what your ideal setting is, but rather on your wonderful friends and family gathered to be with you and have a good time.

Along with Big Disasters, there are minor ones -- the printing company can spell your name wrong on the desert napkins, and all of a sudden you are marrying Mr. Sanders instead of Mr. Sanchez.

Your pink tablecloths can arrive fuchsia.

Two little boys can crawl under the cake table and pull on the table cloth until your glorious eight-story creation is about to topple over, at which point the boys' mother tries to save it by planting both hands into the fondant.

Your husband's not-so-bright cousin with a criminal record can steal your bridal bouquet, and try to sell it for cigarettes.

Your husband's uncle can get very drunk, get very sentimental, and obtain a microphone.

Your father can request the father-daughter dance song be "Dancing Queen" by ABBA. And you mother can Not Like It.

If you have candles, something can, and probably will, catch on fire. And it will probably be someone's hair.

But these things (besides the fire) are what make a wedding fun. The unexpected is humorous. Trust me, if you love the person you are marrying, and love the people around you, these things you think are going wrong now will be laughed at years later.