The Modern Love Machine and I are less than three months away from the wedding, and the wedding planning that seemed like such a pain in the arse a few months ago isn’t so bad after all, despite the fact that it’s become more consuming. I think that has everything to do with the end being in sight, and the final outcome being far more easy to envision now.

The only impressions I had of planning a wedding before getting engaged were that it was time consuming (it is), involved lots of hands-on crafty projects that I don’t generally enjoy or have time for (it doesn’t have to) and that the person doing the planning becomes consumed by the planning, generally causing them to frequently talk about how much they love wedding planning (I haven’t been bit by that bug yet).

This may or may not be me. This is definitely NOT my wedding dress, though.

The mantra for our wedding planning from the get go has been, ‘We’re not doing something just because it’s the way it’s always been done or because it’s the trendy or expected thing to do,’ which gave me the excuse to boot a lot of the hands-on stuff that so many of my married friends did in advance of their weddings. The only “crafty” projects I took on was to design our invitations — which sorta fits into my existing love of web design — and to save glass spaghetti sauce and salsa jars to serve as candle holders for the reception. At some point those will have to be filled with sand and candles, but I’ll get around to that. I figured by pitching any other hands-on crafty things, I’d be saving myself a lot of time and stress.

And herein lies the secret of why wedding planning is so time consuming — a secret that no one had shared with me before and I’m sharing with the world now so that no one again is ever caught off guard. Wedding planning is not time consuming because of crafts and projects (though it can be). It’s time consuming because of the 1.4 million decisions you have to make from the time you get engaged to the time you walk down the aisle.

There’s the obvious decisions like, where will the wedding be? What food will we serve? What dress will I wear? Whom will we invite? — all of those are time-consuming decisions. But there are other time-consuming decisions too, decisions that require lengthy debate, like, what hotel will we stay at during our honeymoon? What song will we dance to? What among the thousands of Bible passages (or poems, or books, or whatever) will we read? What time will the rehearsal dinner be? Will we rent a dance floor? What size should the dance floor be? Where will we rent the dance floor from? Who will be there when the dance floor is set up? Who will be responsible for making sure the dance floor gets picked up? (substitute tables/chairs/linens/ice chests/whatever for dance floor).

Just when you’ve spent hours pouring over a decision, and you’ve finally come to a conclusion on the decision that needs to be made, another one will pop up on your to-do list and seem consuming and weighty. And so many of these things you won’t care about, yet the decision has to be made regardless. And for someone who hates deciding what to eat when she’s not sure what she’s hungry for, this is maddening. It also makes addressing 100 invitations seem not that annoying by comparison.

An aside: The MLM has groaned every time I’ve mentioned, ‘We need to figure out what song our first dance will be to. We do have a song that’s ‘our song,’ but for a particular significance has to be the final song of the evening (and no, it’s not Last Dance. Sorry, Donna Summer). He groans because we have no idea, and we both know we’re going to have to have a First Dance Summit one night or weekend to figure it out.

Here’s something else that surprised me in this wedding planning process: homesickness. In planning a wedding that’s taking place in my hometown, I’ve had to think constantly about my hometown. And I’m frequently homesick now. It may be intensified by the fact I didn’t get to make the trip to Memphis this year that I usually make in March. I haven’t been since Christmas, and my next visit won’t be until May. Still, as I plan out places for our guests to visit and contemplate the logistics of getting everyone here and there in the city on the wedding day, I can’t help but think how much I’d like to be driving those roads RIGHT NOW. And one of the things I’m most excited about for the wedding is the chance to just spend a week in Memphis with my family.

Anyway, I’m off to take advantage of some rare free time. On the menu is reserving some hotel rooms for our honeymoon, mulling the order of service for the ceremony and possibly stalking the jewelry store to figure out why the eff it hasn’t called to say we can order the MLM’s wedding band. Less than three more months to go.