Lemondrop

Planning a long-distance wedding is never easy. Even with the assistance of our wedding planner, the über-talented Julie Conley of "Whose Wedding Is it Anyway?" fame (JB and I almost made it onto the show), the year between getting engaged and saying "I do" was one of the most stressful I have ever endured.

Looking back, I can identify three major triggers:

Picking a Date
JB and I agreed to get married in New Jersey, where I was raised, but first we had to pick a date. I had always wanted a fall wedding for the cool, crisp autumn air (no humidity means less frizzy hair) and the gloriously colored foliage. However, that would leave us short on time to plan the perfect wedding, since we got engaged in April.

Our next choice was Memorial Day weekend. Because JB and many of his friends were in the military, the holiday would guarantee that they would have time off from work. But a couple of months into the wedding planning, we learned that JB would be deployed for the first time two weeks after the wedding, meaning that we would have to postpone our honeymoon until he returned.

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Dealing with Distance

I'm a very visual person, so it was hard to do much of the initial planning over e-mail and the phone. I often ended up feeling like the third-wheel -- like my mom and Julie were doing all of the planning for my wedding, and I was being kept out of the loop. Of course they weren't conspiring against me, but that's how it felt being all the way out in Omaha. Sometimes after speaking to my mom on the phone, I felt so frustrated that I literally wanted to throw things across the room. (Truthfully, I might have chucked a couple of pens against the wall once or twice ...)

The distance also meant that whenever I flew home to N.J., a lot of decisions had to be made in short periods of time. I literally picked a wedding gown in two hours. (I later ended up exchanging it three months before the wedding for something completely different, but that's a whole other story!)

Getting Involved

In the beginning, my fiancé and I disagreed on how involved he would be in the decision-making. I spent the majority of my days in Omaha reading wedding magazines and blogs, and I developed very specific ideas about what I wanted. JB believed that since this was his wedding too, he should have an equal say in all the decisions. It didn't matter to him that grooms are traditionally less involved in the planning than the bride and her family. It also didn't help that sometimes JB argues for the sake of arguing, which slowed down our decision-making and frustrated me to no end.

Of course, in the end, everything worked itself out, and my wedding day, May 25, 2008, was the most magical day of my life. I had never felt as beautiful or as loved as I did on that day, and I will always remember my own and my guests' reactions to the amazing flowers and decor created by Julie and her team. From the weather to the band to the photographer, my wedding day was as close to perfect as possible (because I finally learned that there is no such thing as perfect!).

Still, if I could have avoided planning a long-distance wedding, you can bet that I would have in a heartbeat!

Are you planning your wedding long-distance? If so, I'd love to hear how it's going for you. Please leave your comments below!