Your wits are scattering like a handful of marbles dropped on the bathroom floor.
This is it. D-day has finally arrived.
Months of meticulous planning has led up to this moment and now, after years of dreaming of your big day, it’s here – and things have turned to sh*t.
You thought that your wedding day would pan out like the pages of a magazine, with all of the working components sliding neatly into place as you and your loving husband-to-be start your lives together surrounded by friends and family.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t often work out the way we want it to and things are going from bad to worse.
Your Maid of Honour’s flight gets delayed.
The bridesmaids look like they’ve been rolling around in Doritos after a last-minute tan job.
On a positive note, the white marks the deodorant left on their black dresses really sets off their permatans.
The groom got stroppy the night before and is down an eyebrow, courtesy of three-quarters of a bottle of gin and some top friends.
The groom is also sporting DIY ink on the back of his neck and probably hepatitis too, thanks to a home tattoo machine the best man bought on eBay for your special day.
The flowers arrive and they aren’t what you ordered. Not even close.
Pollen from the erroneous flowers stains your dress.
The ‘do your hairdresser has spent 40 minutes working on looks a little like this:
The limo you and the bridal party are riding in gets stuck behind a hearse on your way to the church.
You’re starving and the only thing you have on you is a packet of half-melted M&Ms.
The flower girl gets sick from eating too many M&Ms and throws up in the back of limo.
The photographer has a family emergency and has to send a back-up at the last minute.
The Mother of the Bride has already fainted.
The Father of the Bride is already drunk.
The flower girl treads on your dress when getting out of the car and rips it.
It’s starting to rain.
You get photo-bombed by this guy when taking the official photographs:
The driver of the bus gets lost while taking your guests to the reception, setting the timelines for the catering staff back an hour.
The buttercream in your three-tier wedding cake melts after being left out for too long, causing the cake to become structurally unsound.
The wind picks up unexpectedly, toppling your marquee like a house of cards.
A fuse blows at your back-up venue, plunging you all into darkness.
Your new mother-in-law starts a sing-along to break the silence.
The final payment for the long-suffering catering staff has gone missing.
The cake finally collapses; and thanks to Dad, you’ve already run out of alcohol.
So what if your wedding day turns out like the lyrics of a bad Alanis Morissette song?
After all, isn’t saying I do really about just that: saying I do and making a commitment to the one you love? The rest is really just buttercream on a decumbent cake.
What may seem like disaster on the day will often become that story that you tell over and over again; the one that your children and grandchildren love because it reminds them that life is messy and nothing is perfect.
So don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep your chin up and remember what weddings are really all about – getting obscenely drunk with your relatives.
This is a sample taken from the chapter When It All Goes Wrong: How To Survive The Wedding From Hell in the book Weddings Know-How: Planning Your Wedding. The chapter is written by Katherine Burgess. Weddings Know-How: Planning Your Wedding is available from Amazon.