I Am Dan

Ok. So this is my first post as a guest blogger for Staggered and, frankly, I’m over the moon to be doing it. I won’t kick off with a vast amount of detail as a bit of an intro is probably in order to give you an idea of why I’m writing this.

In short, I proposed eighteen months ago and, right now, I’m at the end of a blissful period of not really worrying too much about planning our wedding. Where I’m going is my wedding day on 19th June, 2010 and a rather large reality is beginning to dawn on me… There is a lot to do.

Over the coming months, I’ll be posting entries about what I’ve done so far and what I’m doing next and, hopefully, it’ll be helpful, insightful, funny or maybe just reassure you things aren’t as bad as they seem…

So what’s my story? I met Liz about six and a half years ago in Bristol, thanks to a blind date set up by our friend Ana . Neither of us knew about it until we were actually at Ana’s party, where she duly plonked us in front of each other, smiled and the simply stated “You’re both a bit weird. You’ll get on.”

We did and I proposed after we’d been together for five years and one day. My brother proposed to his now-wife on their fifth year anniversary and, after a few rumblings from family about me doing the same thing, I thought I’d leave it until the day after just in case Liz was expecting anything. I’ll go in to more detail on this in a later post and, without spoiling a pretty obvious ending, she said yes.

In the eighteen months since I proposed, we did the thick end of bugger all for the first six months – I run my own design agency and with Liz approaching the end of a Masters as well as being a trainee curator at a national museum, we simply didn’t have any free time. Then we started getting panicky parents, saying venues would be booked up and we had to get our skates on.

Right now, we have an engagement ring. We have a license. We have a fantastic venue and caterers for our ‘big wedding in a field’ and have just booked a humanist celebrant for it. We’ve booked a registry office for the legal bit. The guest list is sorted and we’ve managed to speak to most people on it so they don’t book a weekend at Butlins instead, but still have a few to contact this week.

Everything else is still to do, but it’s fine. Is that denial? Is it actually fine?

I think the big thing to remember here is I’m not the first and won’t be the last to go through this. Neither will you. There’s loads of us all over the place, in the thick of some part of wedding prep. And most are likely to be a damn site more organised than me. If I can make it through, so can you.

I am Dan. Stick with me and, with a little luck, we’ll all make it safely to our respective big days.

Related Posts:

• Getting In Shape For The Wedding
• The Bigger Question
• Mmmbop And Questions Popped – Part 2
• Too Much Prep?
• Engagement Rings And Proposals Abroad: Part Deux