My wedding is in one year. January 15, 2011. I thought I'd document the experience of trying to plan it.
I wouldn't really call myself your "typical girl" but I do have some typically girly characteristics, such as thinking about what my wedding would be like since I realized what weddings were. As soon as my fiancé, Jason, and I discussed and agreed on getting "engaged to be engaged" (ha, ha.. Yeah right) I blew up the Internet and had my bridesmaids dresses, shoes and bouquet picked out the next day. It was fun and exciting and I was really into the whole thing, because it didn't seem real. I could look up wedding websites and buy bridal magazines without being worried that he'd come in the room and see what I was doing. It was like that for about a month. I knew I didn't want a diamond, so I scoured etsy.com sending him emails of rings I liked that were in our budget, sucking all the romance and surprise out of the whole thing because, who knew, I'm kind of a control freak. But, because he's kind of awesome, he found his own ring on his own with no help from me that was better than anything I'd found and was basically exactly as I'd been describing for years when my friends and I would sit around and plan our perfect so very us engagement rings that we would hypothetically get from our hypothetical boyfriends. Hypothetical - that's how everything kind of was - except I could be open about it.
When he proposed on Christmas day during a cigarette break in my parents backyard, and I got to put my perfect ring on my stubby unmanicured finger, it became not so hypothetical. It went from being imagination land to oh shit, this is like, real. I just got proposed to and it wasn't exactly like I'd fantasized about, oh god, because I had to go and control everything and ruin it. It was still sweet, even though I knew it was coming. Anyway, that's what works for us. We like to be in agreement on things. Sometimes he needs a push, and It just so happens that sometimes I can be pushy.
After we made it legit by changing our facebook statuses, I kind of backed off from obsessively looking at magazines and the Internet. I pretty much didn't for a week or two. It freaked me out.
I'm still freaked out, kind of, now i'm freaking out about money, and am I really going to be able to pull one of these things off in a year? I have no idea what I'm doing.
So I'll be tracking my progress here, and we shall see if I can in fact pull this off.