Wedding

 To make a long story somewhat shorter, we were right. In the past 17 years, we have "mystery shopped" over 1000 wedding businesses, from bridal shops to caterers;photographers to bakeries. Form these anonymous visits, we learned a lot about planning a wedding. We realized there are tricks to spotting a truly talented wedding photographer or finding a bakery that creates cinderella wedding dresses the best wedding cakes. At the same time, we learned how to identify dishonest merchants who will try to rip off brides with dubious products or inferior service.

 We first look those experiences and wrote six regional guides to planning a wedding for cities in the Southwest. But we didn't stop there. For this book, we spent over a dozen years interviewing bridal professionals and wedding "experts" across the country. We then spoke to hundreds of engaged couples, carefully documenting problems and challenges they had encountered planning their weddings. When you read this book, you not only get our opinions but the wise advice of many recently married couples that have gone before you.

 Weddings often become less a celebration of marriage and more like a huge social torture test for the participants. Parents and even some brides and grooms, are frequently guilty of turning weddings into spectacles to impress their friends or business associates. Money can become the sticking point classic wedding dresses since whoever pays for the wedding may feel a divine right to influence the proceedings with their own tastes.

 Sometimes, parents or relatives try to make your wedding into the wedding they never had. Your friends may be guilty of pressuring you to make your wedding fit some predetermined mold. Put another way, while you may be the stars of the show, you and your fiance may not be the wedding's directors, producers or choreographers.

 Perfect weddings don't exist in the free world. No matter what anyone tells you, understand that the  "perfect wedding" is an impossibility on strapless wedding dresses planet Earth. That's because weddings always involve human beings who, on the whole, tend to be less than perfect creatures. We suggest you aim for a "fantastic" or "wonderful" wedding. Or even just a fun wedding!