Motivational Monday | Alyson + Dustin’s Better Than Dreamland Wedding @WeddingMix

Hold up. June bride-to-be Alyson just said what a lot of brides are thinking: it is MUCH easier to plan a wedding in your head than to actually plan in real life. So does this week’s Motivational Monday bride let that stop her from having her dream wedding? HECK NO! Read on to see how Alyson and Craig figured out that it’s not the catering or the venue that will make their wedding perfect – it’s the intimate celebration with the ones they love. 

Dustin and I dated for eight years, throughout college and post-graduate life, before finally taking our love down the road to the altar. After spending all of these years ‘planning’ our perfect wedding, I figured the actual wedding planning would be a piece of (white, tiered, buttercream frosted with a veiled figure on top) cake when we began the process as fiancés.

I realized very quickly it is much easier to plan a wedding in dreamland than in real life. Immediately after the perfect proposal, Dustin and I began piecing together the wedding of our dreams, an elaborate plan that would perfectly encompass our personalities and include our entire circle of friends, family, and colleagues. We went as far as placing a deposit on a quaint venue in my college town before we realized we wanted our special day to be more personal and include more of the people we love than our initial outlook – particularly the venue or our finances — could offer. We were consumed with the wedding process and needed to take a step back to realize we wanted something more intimate than we were going to get.

After eight years of dating and several of those spent dreaming of my perfect wedding, I knew it was going to take something really special to live up to my standards on our big day. What I realized through trial-and-error was that all I really needed was love, and that includes the man I am going to marry as well as the other special people in our lives. After all, the marriage is more important than the wedding!

Dustin and I have ultimately decided to make our wedding day personal and intimate and yet still relaxed and laid back. We have elected to have our wedding ceremony at my father and stepmother’s home and reception at Dustin’s parents’ home. Once we settled into this new plan, things began to slowly fall into place. By choosing a venue without catering requirements and the cut-and-paste A or B venue setup, we have been able to be involved with every step of the wedding planning process, making it truly our own. I have pored over every detail of the wedding, from tents and tables to appetizers and I-Do’s, and am ready to walk down the aisle with my best friend in a wedding that will be completely original and full of the same love that has existed for the last eight years and will go on forever, long past our big day.