On Sunday mornings, wedding planners devote their time to prayer. It’s not because they are particularly religious, but rather because this is when clients reflect on whether or not they are truly happy with their weddings that took place on Saturdays. If they decide to embrace unhappiness, Sunday is the day they assign blame. And on Monday, the wedding planners receive a flood of emails.
Weddings are peculiar events, filled with tension, high expenses, and emotional turmoil. They are revisited time and time again by the couple, their families, and the individual paying the bills. While weddings mark the beginning of a couple’s new life together, they can also lead to family disputes, broken friendships, and lingering financial regret. So, even if the wedding went smoothly, the wedding planner still prays on Sundays.
Will the emails from clients be full of happiness and praise, or will they be complaints? During my time as a luxury wedding planner in New York City, my partner and I once received an email from a bride as she flew off to her honeymoon, describing her wedding as a “transcendent experience.” Shortly after, we received a call from the bride’s mother who asked us to repeat the phrase, “I am bad at my job. I should never do this job again.” Sometimes, clients just need to let off steam, while others may even threaten legal action.
The work of a luxury wedding planner goes beyond just event planning. Yes, they assist couples in creating a stunning event, but their main responsibility is to be a professional wedding confidant. They care about the smallest details, like whether the bow on a favor has a swallow or inverse tails, or if the maid of honor is exhibiting passive-aggressive behavior that other friends of the bride no longer want to discuss. The family is paying the wedding planner to care as much as they do.
When I became a wedding planner, my own family couldn’t understand the value of my role. My grandparents, who raised me, had a simple wedding where they rented a hall, piled tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches on a table, and threw them across the room to the guests who shouted out their preferences. They wondered how complicated a wedding could be. If I had chosen to be a professional mud wrestler instead, they probably would have been less perplexed.
To prove the significance of my job to my family, whenever one of our events was featured in a bridal magazine, I would bring it to family gatherings and proudly display it, just as others would show off pictures of their children. “Look,” I would say, pointing to the dreamy sailcloth tent adorned with custom-made chandeliers. “There was nothing here but a field. We built all of this.”
Unfortunately, this only added to their confusion. They would question why the couples didn’t use that money to buy a house instead. I would have to explain that the couples already had houses – multiple ones, most likely.
A few years after the recession, I organized a lavish wedding on Long Island. The bride was concerned about adding a custom lining to the invitations, which would cost thousands of dollars on top of the already hefty stationery bill. The couple had been given a seven-figure sum to fund both their wedding and their new home, and the bride had a strong affinity for mid-century modern furniture. It became a dilemma of choosing between the lining or a Wassily chair. She went back and forth, but her mother finally ended the debate by exclaiming, “We’re rich! Get the liners!”
Months later, as she admired the tent we had spent days assembling for the reception, the same mother said, in all seriousness, “I hate that it will only be used for one night. I wish we could find some homeless people to stay here when we’re done.”
One day, a panicked woman called me, desperately needing my partner and me to rescue her daughter’s wedding, without disclosing any specifics over the phone. She insisted that we meet at her upscale apartment to fully grasp the magnitude of the issue. Just before hanging up, she whispered, “By the way, I’m very, very rich.”
And indeed, she was! Her apartment was incredibly opulent, complete with an elevator that opened directly into the living space due to its sprawling size. A uniformed maid escorted us through an art-lined hallway and into the library, where the mother awaited us.
She explained the situation. Her daughter was embarrassed by their family’s wealth and had been living as a closeted rich person for years, with her friends being entirely unaware. The bride didn’t want her mother involved with the wedding because it would expose her secret. To compensate, the daughter had planned what she believed was an “average wedding” using information from the internet and her mother’s unlimited funds.
With the wedding just weeks away, the mother had started to realize how terrible the plans were. Not only did her daughter have conflicting views on her own privilege, but she also had questionable taste, thinking that the “average” bride wanted things like jam jars for wine glasses, picnic tables for seating, and a limited bar.
The mother and daughter reached a compromise – they would hire me as their wedding planner. They chose me because while many competitors specialized in opulence, I had cornered the market in “understated luxury.”
The mother insisted on an immediate meeting because the bride planned to hire us the next day, and the mother wanted to ensure I understood the arrangement. My role, in addition to preventing an embarrassing wedding, was to say yes to every request the daughter made. If the bride asked about the cost of something, I was to reply that it was “already included in the contract.” The mother didn’t care about the expenses and agreed to cover them secretly. It may have sounded crazy, but I needed the money.
I was amazed at how well the strategy worked. When I suggested serving baby lamb chops, the bride would question if they were more expensive than pigs in a blanket. I assured her, as per our agreement, that everything was covered in the contract.
However, one day, the bride expressed her desire to reduce the carbon footprint of the wedding by using edible escort cards. Escort cards inform guests where to sit and are usually made of folded cardstock. The bride’s idea was to stick toothpicks with tiny tags displaying names and table numbers into bacon-wrapped dates, combining appetizers and escort cards to save the environment.
Though I nodded in agreement, I felt a sense of panic and emailed the mother, explaining that it would resemble a table full of floating turds. I asked her what we should do.
“For Christ’s sake, why can’t you be my daughter?” she replied.
The mother explained that she had grown up poor, just like me, but unlike me, she married into wealth. “Marry rich!” she would tell me. “It’s so much fun!” While I haven’t had the chance to try it out, I suspect she’s right. We agreed that when you have more money than you know what to do with, there’s no better way to spend it than by throwing luxurious events for others to enjoy.
Some say that there are no coincidences, but the daughter stumbled upon our entire conversation when she logged onto her mother’s computer. Understandably, she didn’t want us to proceed and confronted us about it. Despite the awkward situation, we were able to diffuse it by assuring her that we were there to make her dream wedding happen, regardless of cost.
As a luxury wedding planner, I have witnessed the complexity of these events and how they can affect people’s lives. Sundays are reserved for prayer, hoping for positive emails from clients, but prepared for complaints. My job is to navigate through the intricacies of wedding planning while providing a shoulder to lean on. Wedding planning is not just about creating a beautiful event; it’s about caring as much as the families do and being a friend during an emotionally charged time.
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