Don’t Forget to do this One Thing While You’re Engaged

I never imagined I’d be planning a wedding during my senior year of nursing school — but life is funny like that.

Graduation was looming on the horizon. I was studying for the NCLEX, finishing clinicals, apartment hunting, exercising like it was my part time job and oh yeah — trying to plan a wedding with less than two months to go until the big day. My to-do list was never-ending, and honestly… our relationship felt it.

Then one day, Naz looked at me and gently said: “I feel like you care more about the wedding than you care about me.”

Oof. It stung. At first, I was frustrated. Didn't he see everything I was juggling? But deep down, I knew he wasn’t wrong.

I was so wrapped up in the logistics that I was losing sight of why I was doing any of it in the first place.

So — on a whim, two weeks before our wedding, we hit pause. We took a spontaneous road trip to a music festival in central PA. We had gone as kids, my grandparents lived nearby, and it felt like the perfect, nostalgic, low-pressure escape.

It wasn’t fancy. We didn’t talk about the wedding. We didn’t check off a single thing on the to-do list.

Instead, we did something even better. We reconnected. We laughed. We dreamed about the future. And we remembered: this is what it’s all about.

That last-minute getaway — unplugged, unplanned, and completely off-script — was the best thing we did during our entire engagement.

💬 So here’s our advice, from two people who’ve been there:

✨ Make time for each other — without the planning.✨ Go on a date where wedding talk is off-limits.✨ Laugh. Pray. Dream. Reconnect.✨ Remind yourselves why you’re doing this in the first place.

Your wedding absolutely matters — the details, the beauty, the celebration.

But your marriage matters so much more.

And honestly? The best wedding planning advice we can give is this:

Don’t let planning your wedding cost you your connection.

If the stress is piling up and tensions are high, try the thing that may feel completely counterintuitive: pause the planning — and choose each other.

👉 Step away. Schedule time with no decisions to make, no to-do lists to tackle, no vendors to follow up with. Just the two of you — having fun, being present, remembering why you’re doing this in the first place.

Because at the end of the day, your wedding is just the beginning.

And building a life together? That deserves your energy, too.