How to Help Your Best Friend Plan Her Dream Wedding

Being chosen as the Maid of Honor is a wonderful thing. Your best friend trusts you and loves you and wants you with her every step of the way towards one for the best days of her life. Weddings are big, and they require a lot of planning and management and one bride simply cannot do it all by herself. Then, of course, there are activities like the bridal shower and the bachelorette party that the maid of honor plans for the bride-to-be. There are so many ways you can join your best friend on this journey, and your help can make all the difference between a good wedding and an unforgettable one.

Knowing what to do, of course, doesn’t come naturally. Planning a wedding takes a lot of time and taking the right steps at the right time is key.

Follow this guide, and you will be the best Maid of Honor anyone could ask for:

Start with the Venue

The bulk of your best friend’s wedding budget will come in the form of the venue. Though the final decision will lie with her and her family, it can be a great help to find wedding venue deals for them to consider. These deals will ensure your bride can have a beautiful destination for both the wedding and the reception, as well as some key bonuses like catering or a glass of champagne. If the venue typically runs as a hotel, you could even get a deal so that guests who come from far away can spend the night for a decent price.

Help Her Be Realistic with Her Decisions

It can be so easy to get caught up in decorations and food and party favors as a bride. You want to throw an incredible, never-to-be-forgotten day that you will take with you forever. It’s not every day you get to plan and be a part of such a massive party, after all, but that’s where things can go wrong. Decoration costs can easily get out of hand and then go beyond your bride’s budget. Help her out as the Maid of Honor by encouraging her to edit back the decisions. The secret to elegance is simplicity, and if you two can find ways to create your own decorations, you and the bridal party will have a fun weekend planned ahead of you.

Keep Her Motivated

When it comes to picking out a wedding dress, things can get frustrating very quickly. Wedding dresses typically cost a lot, and the pressure to find “the one” dress can mean you can visit bridal store after bridal store and continually come up with nothing. If your friend has a tight budget, try suggesting buying a second-hand wedding dress. Those dresses would only have been worn once in their lifetimes, meaning that they are, in many ways, in better shape than the dresses you try on in store. By opting for second hand, she can get a better dress for her budget, meaning she can have the dream look she’s always wanted.

If she has her heart set on a new dress, try to keep her motivated. Make each bridal shop visit an exciting day. Get dressed up together, have brunch, and then head out. Make the visit part of the experience, rather than another one that bites the dust. If the window of time to get a dress is dwindling, and she still cannot find the very specific dress she is looking for, suggest that she get one commissioned.

The Bridal Shower and the Bachelorette Party

For the Maid of Honor, organizing these events is the highlight of your title. If you are confused about the difference between a bridal shower and a bachelorette party, don’t worry. Typically, the bridal shower is a fancier, more elegant version of the bachelorette party, which mirrors a bachelor’s party. You can host one or both of these events for your friend, and they don’t have to cost you a lot to do.

Start first by organizing her friends together and discussing how much everyone should contribute. You can, of course, organize a bridal shower by renting out a private area at a restaurant and then split the bills, but for a truly original party, you will need to have a budget. Just because you are the Maid of Honor does not mean that financial responsibility lies with you. There are two ways to acquire this funding. You can organize a bridal shower or bachelorette party and then come to the bridal party with how much it would cost, or you can have everyone pitch in money and plan a party (or two) around the budget you have.

Either way, aim to make each event fun. A bridal shower can be the time to invite the bride’s friends and family and have a nice meal together before the wedding, while a bachelorette party can be where the bride can have fun with her best friends, some Newcastle Strippers, and a great night out partying. There are so many options for these parties, and it will be up to you to plan one that suits her to a T. The more bespoke the bachelorette party, the better. If that means she would prefer going camping in the wilderness for a weekend, so be it. Remember her in your planning, and try to keep it a surprise. She’ll have been planning her entire wedding out until this point so it will be nice to have at least one event that she had no hand in arranging.

Being the Maid of Honor means being there to support your best friend through all the ups and downs of planning a wedding. She will get frustrated, of course, because even the most down-to-earth bride can get disheartened when all her efforts into planning don’t pan out the way she expected them to. This is especially true due to the typically high price tag attached to weddings. No one wants to spend a lot of money and not have the perfect day. That is why it is up to you to help her stay calm, happy, and help her enjoy every day in the lead up to her wedding.

Thanks to Fatima