THE TRUTH ABOUT WEDDINGS

Brides editor Jade Beer shares her advice for those planning nuptials

The world is fizzing with excitement in the run-up to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s nuptials, yet if you’d asked me at the time if planning my wedding changed me at all, I would have told you no. I was sensible, not about to succumb to every cliché about irrational brides. I briefed my mum to tell my father there should be no big emotional chat ahead of our aisle walk. I was not getting a face full of expensive make-up to see it all slide off under a tsunami of tears. Then I told Mum she must not cry during the service, or it would set me off and I’d mess up my vows. How could I have denied them these parental rites of passage? What might my dad’s words have been? And wouldn’t it be lovely to store them away for when they’d be all I had left of him? I wish Mum had ignored me too, but she didn’t. She held it all in.

There were many things I could have worried about that day – that my new husband would clatter into the cake and knock the top tier to the floor. Or that the unprepared best man would be writing his speech while my father delivered his. But, really, I should have turned the spotlight off myself and realised we were running out of time with the funniest granny who ever lived. Why did I never think to have a picture taken with just her?

Why did I care so much about tears? I know now they’re the one thing every good wedding needs. And the irony is, I have cried at just about every wedding I’ve attended since my own, even those of strangers. Why? I see a couple on the precipice of something so significant and I feel a great swell of happiness for them, but also a tinge of jealousy that they have it all to come, while I am 17 years in with my university sweetheart. All those

extraordinary highs (travelling the world together, promotions landed, houses bought) and gut-wrenching lows (would we ever get the babies we wanted?). But we do it all together. How incredibly fortunate is that?

The fact that my husband and I found each other when we were born hundreds of miles apart and into very different families still surprises me. Although I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was kicking off about the lack of flowers on my wedding morning, adding another £1,000 to the bill for two giant floral balls to hang from the marquee ceiling. No one commented on them. Guests don’t look up.

Planning a perfect wedding is the easy bit, and many brides I have worked with go to extraordinary lengths to do just that – in my first week in the job, wedding pictures from a beautiful American bride who had spent £80,000 on her flowers landed on my desk.

The effort, enthusiasm and dedication people bring to wedding planning always astounds me, and is ultimately what inspired my first novel. I don’t think there’s much wrong with that, but trying to plan the perfect marriage is probably something no one should attempt. All are flawed in some way. And how could anyone even begin to define what the perfect marriage is? For me, it’s about a deep sense of closeness and honesty that I don’t have with anyone else. For the next woman it might be about the space to live her life the way she wants to. My husband and I have a photo album we update with one image of us a year, on our anniversary. Some people may find that incredibly cheesy. For us, it’s a shocking account of who has aged better – but also a brilliant reminder of how well suited we are. I often wonder how I will feel looking at that book when we are cuddling our grandchildren.

I have had the enormous privilege of sneaking a look into hundreds of women’s wedding days – the opening scene of their marriages. I have sat through weddings that made me feel uncomfortable – like the one where the bride walked the aisle with her eyes on her feet and kept them there throughout the service, such were her nerves. She later divorced. Or, worse still, the bride who arrived at the church and was overheard asking, ‘Is he here?’ I sat in the pews surrounded by people who knew the groom was having an affair. I watched the bride shake all the way up the aisle, perhaps terrified that something, or someone, would halt the proceedings. It didn’t, but they were also divorced within the year. I think about that day sometimes. Why didn’t they just call it off? I hope pride had more to do with it than the fact the invitations had gone out. That fear of judgement is often so central to wedding worries: will the food be interesting, the speeches funny, the flowers abundant, the guest-gifting lavish? The truth is, all guests really worry about is that they’re not kept waiting an age for lunch and that they’re never more than three paces from an open bar.

But there are two stories that really stick in my mind. One about a woman who married last year in the back garden of the Norwich family home where she grew up. It was a triumph of collective DIY skills. Bridesmaids made decorations, friends gathered flowers for the tables, her dad and brother organised games and her mother cooked – quiches and tarts made in the kitchen where she had prepared countless meals, and where now she was preparing her daughter’s wedding breakfast. It spoke to me of true maternal love.

But the story that resonates with me more than any other was the woman planning her wedding without her mum, who had lost her battle with breast cancer just days after her 30th wedding anniversary. The bride talked so eloquently about how her mother had shaped her view of marriage, and how she put her mother’s wedding ring on after the funeral and never took it off. But also the deeprooted pain of knowing her mother would never meet her husband or know her children. How she struggled with dress shopping, and felt the need to explain to every assistant that her mother was dead, in case they assumed she didn’t care enough to come. After one particularly teary appointment, she couldn’t face another for five months and the planning stalled – until her fiancé stepped in. He sent her links to boutiques and images of dresses he thought she’d like. Then he went to appointments with her, seeing every dress she tried on, including The One. As the bride herself said, ‘I shifted my focus from what I didn’t have to what I did.’ Wonderful advice for wedding planning, acing your marriage and life in general, I’d say.

If I could do it all over again, there are some things I’d do differently: I’d learn how to shop for a wedding dress for a start, and not go to a sample sale wearing a black thong having done zero research. But the beauty of having daughters is you do get to do it all over again (I hope). My nine-year-old has a picture of the dress she wants for her wedding pinned to a noticeboard. I try not to let my job skew her view of wedding planning and the value of a good marriage, and I thought I was doing well until the other day she asked, ‘Why didn’t you just marry a rich man?’ My work is a long way from being done.

‘PLANNING A PERFECT WEDDING IS THE EASY BIT’