Each week, when I prepare to write a new article on relationship health, I start by researching what couples are searching for. There is no point in answering questions that nobody is asking, so I use a tool called Answer the Public, and I am always amazed by what I find.

This week, I wanted to look at the wedding planning process for newly engaged couples, and wow, these searches were bleak:

• Why is wedding planning so stressful?
• Can wedding planning ruin your relationship?
• Can wedding planning cause depression?
• Wedding planning is making me depressed.
• Wedding planning is ruining our relationship.
• Can wedding stress delay your period?
• Why am I so stressed about getting married?
• Is wedding stress normal?

Yikes.

What are we doing to ourselves? I’ve written over and over about the stresses of modern life and how they take a toll on our mental and physical health, and especially on our relationships. No one gets engaged thinking, I’m excited to make my life harder. The goal of getting married for most young couples is to enhance your life, to have a partner to share the joys and challenges with. Maybe to have children, but not always.

We make these important decisions with unspoken expectations, but more often than not, the outcomes we live don’t come anywhere close to matching those expectations.

Last week, I wrote about whether or not couples who want equality should get married. This week, let’s look at wedding planning. Why is it so stressful and what can you can do to sync your expectations with your reality?

Where Most Couples Start (And Why It’s Already Overwhelming)

As a thought experiment, I decided to immerse myself in the experience of being newly engaged. I began with the most common question that came up in my research: “Where to start wedding planning?”

So I started searching. I asked that question exactly of ChatGPT, Google, Pinterest, and Instagram. Here’s what each told me.

ChatGPT had decent, albeit generic advice:

1. Talk with Your Partner First
2. Set a Realistic Budget
3. Choose a Timeframe
4. Draft a Guest List
5. Book the Venue
6. Decide if You Need a Planner
7. Lock In Key Vendors Next
8. Start a Planning System
9. Enjoy the Engagement

Sounds straightforward, right? ChatGPT makes it seem like wedding planning is just a matter of checking boxes in the right order.

Google showed several sponsored posts first. Zola, The Knot, Paperless Post, and WithJoy.com were followed by an AI overview with videos (also summarized by AI), a Reddit conversation, and more wedding planning businesses offering their services.

Pinterest and Instagram showed HUNDREDS of beautifully designed checklists, timelines, and hacks for planning a wedding. Page after page of posts with “where to start,” “secrets for planning,” “regrets,” “what not to do,” “what you’re missing.”

I’m already overwhelmed, and I’m beginning to understand all of those stress-related questions above. The sheer volume of information, much of it contradictory and all of it designed to sell you something, is a source of stress itself.

The Hidden Time Cost of Wedding Planning

That was a lot, and I just scratched the surface. Given the massive amounts of information out there and the extremely complex and emotionally difficult tasks involved in wedding planning, how much time are couples actually spending on wedding planning?

Looking across a variety of sources, including WeddingWire, The Knot, and Forbes, estimates range from 6-12 hours per week, depending on the length of the engagement, the type of wedding, and whether couples engage a wedding planner.

That’s a HUGE amount of time and energy. For context, that’s equivalent to adding a part-time job on top of your existing full-time work, relationship maintenance, family obligations, and social life.

Who Is Responsible for Planning a Wedding? 

Now, the question you know I’m going to ask: Is this work being shared equally between partners?

I already know what the research says (and I bet you can guess too), but let’s ask the internet again. One of the commonly searched questions regarding wedding planning was, “Who is responsible for planning a wedding?”

All of the platforms above offered variations on “it’s the couple’s responsibility” and “tasks should be shared intentionally.” The messaging is clear: Of course wedding planning is a joint endeavor. Of course it should be equal.

But a cursory look at anything wedding-related shows that EVERYTHING is targeted at the bride. There are hundreds of bridal shows across the country and glossy bridal magazines (print and virtual) everywhere. Almost none of the messaging is targeted exclusively at grooms. There has been a move toward gender-neutral, inclusive language, but the underlying message is that a wedding is all about the bride.

Let’s look at what the research actually shows.

What the Research Reveals About Wedding Planning and Gender

A 2020 study, It’s the Best Day of Your Life: Dominant Discourses in Bride’s Wedding Planning, by Laura Stafford et al at Bowling Green State University, analyzed interviews of newly married women about their experience with wedding planning. They found that “brides are subjected to pervasive and persuasive cultural messages about what they should do, feel, and think regarding their weddings and about appropriate and desirable kinds of weddings. One such discourse is that the wedding is primarily the purview of the bride; it is her day, and it is hers to plan. In fact, the bride should have been planning a wedding since girlhood.”

In Is It Our Day or the Bride’s Day? The Division of Wedding Labor and Its Meaning for Couples, Tamara Sniezek explores the experiences of both partners through interviews with heterosexual engaged couples. What she finds is that couples talked about wedding planning as a joint, shared, equitable project, but the actual division of labor was nowhere near equal.

Sniezek compared what the couples claimed about wedding work to time diaries and task lists. In one example where the couple reported an equal division of labor, it turned out that the bride performed nearly double the tasks of her fiancé.

Sniezek further found that most of the brides used a variety of strategies to construct the illusion of a shared experience, including:

• Sharing information with the groom
• Having the groom meet with a selected number of vendors
• Soliciting advice with decision-making

But the cognitive load, the research, the anticipation, and the monitoring? That fell disproportionately to the bride.

Even Norway Can’t Escape This Pattern

You might think this is uniquely an American problem, a reflection of our culture’s lingering sexism or our particular wedding industry’s marketing tactics.

But a 2023 Norwegian study found that even in Norway, ranked #2 in the world for gender equality, couples still defaulted to gendered wedding planning patterns. Norway has 46% women in parliament, generous parental leave policies, and scores 87.9% on the Global Gender Gap Index. For comparison, the United States ranks #43 with only 74.8% gender parity.

The Norwegian researchers found that even “couples who are gender equal in their relational orientation, often have an unequal division of wedding work.” They identified “maintainers” versus “resisters.” Among maintainers, “women did the main planning and most of the work and knew how things should be, while men had an assisting role.”

What this research show is that this is about deeply embedded structural forces and cultural scripts that even the most equality-minded couples struggle against.

The Cognitive Dissonance That’s Making You Stressed

Perhaps some of the stress that couples encounter when they’re wedding planning is that they’re faced with cognitive dissonance. They want an equal partnership. They talk about having an equal partnership. But they don’t actually have an equal partnership.

And this plays out long after the wedding day for many heterosexual couples who don’t address this disparity head-on.

In fact, this dynamic closely resembles Dr. Allison Daminger’s research on cognitive labor, which she breaks down into four distinct categories: anticipating needs, researching options, making decisions, and monitoring progress.

In her study of household division of labor, she found that women carried far more of the anticipation, research, and monitoring work, while decision-making tended to be the only area shared somewhat equitably. However, heterosexual couples described this division as equitable and further used personality attributes to explain division of labor, like “I’m just better at this,” or “I care more about it,” to explain away the discrepancies.

Sound familiar?

Why Wedding Planning Stress Is Really Relationship Stress

So to recap, some of the stress we experience in wedding planning comes from being told that gender equality has been achieved. But it hasn’t, so we find ways to manage the cognitive dissonance of the unequal division of labor in wedding planning by telling ourselves stories that our unequal division is actually equal.

The stress isn’t just about finding the perfect venue, staying within budget, or managing family dynamics. The stress is about confronting the gap between who you want to be as a couple and the patterns you’re already falling into.

This matters because wedding planning is a preview of marriage. The dynamics you establish now, who does the invisible labor, who makes the decisions, who carries the mental load, will likely continue into your married life together.

What Newly Engaged Couples Can Do Differently

Now that we’ve identified a significant factor in wedding planning stress, what can you do differently to get a better outcome?

As much as I hate to say this, ChatGPT offered the most helpful advice in this case: Talk with Your Partner First.

Now, ChatGPT makes it seem like an easy conversation to quickly decide on wedding priorities, set a budget, and come up with a rough guest count. What ChatGPT doesn’t address is just how difficult and emotionally charged each element of those decisions can be. In reality, your post-engagement conversations need to be much, much deeper.

Here are some suggestions for having real conversations that matter:

1. Start with WHY you’re choosing to get married

Why is the act of marriage important to you beyond “we love each other” or “it’s what we’ve always expected to do”? Really think about it. What kind of marriage do you want? What marriages in your life do you admire? What kinds of marriages do you want to avoid? How do you plan to enhance each other’s lives?

2. Talk about your shared values

What beliefs do each of you hold? How do they align? How do they differ? How will your values influence the life and marriage you plan to build?

3. Design a celebration that honors your actual goals

Notice that we haven’t even started talking about the wedding yet? Once you’re both really clear on why you’re getting married, your shared values, and what kind of marriage you want, then it’s time to think about a celebration that honors those goals.

If you jump straight into wedding planning, you are going to be unduly influenced by all of the gorgeous, shiny objects on social media. You’ll start fantasizing about dresses and decor before you decide what you want your wedding day to represent.

4. Plan strategies to stay grounded throughout the process

Post your values somewhere you can both see them. Refer to them often in the decision-making process. Does that extra expense align with the values you’ve articulated together?

Have regular check-ins to make sure the wedding planning work is shared equitably, and you both feel engaged in the planning. Not just “Are we getting things done?” but “How are we each experiencing this process? What invisible labor might be falling through the cracks?”

5. Make premarital education a priority in your wedding planning process

Religious couples already do this, usually because it’s required, but secular couples need and deserve this support too.

The engagement period is a unique developmental window for relationship growth that you can’t go back and redo later. Find a coach or therapist whose values align with your own and do that work alongside the wedding planning process.

I know it sounds like extra work on top of an already busy time in your lives, but it will make the whole process run more smoothly. You’ll learn about each other, uncover any unconscious conditioning you’re bringing into the relationship, and learn how to manage difficult conversations and family dynamics together.

It is truly the greatest gift you can give to each other, and I’m certain it will result in a better, more authentic, aligned wedding day.

Ready to Start Your Engagement Differently?

If you’d like to kickstart your wedding planning in a truly unique and supportive way, please consider learning more about the upcoming Alchemy Intensive Retreat I’m offering March 27-30th in Santa Barbara. You’ll achieve months worth of premarital work in a long weekend, with an intimate cohort of other couples doing the same. It’s truly transformative for couples who want marriages as exceptional as their wedding day. 

I know that it may feel like a significant investment of time and resources at a time when you’re planning to spend those resources on a wedding. But really, what is more important than setting your marriage up for success? It will enrich the rest of your lives together, far beyond that one day.

And if you look at the price and think, “That is way outside of our budget, but it’s exactly what we need,” book a call anyway. We’ll find a way together to get you the support you need.

Free Resource: Shared Values Workshop

As my gift to you this engagement season, I’m giving away access to my shared values workshop. It’s such an important part of the process that I want you all to have access to an exercise that will give you so much clarity as you move forward toward marriage.

Access the workshop here using the code ENGAGED2026.

I’m curious what your experience has been with engagement and wedding planning so far. I’d love to hear from you. Reach out at hello@tendtask.com, or send me a DM on Instagram at @tendtask.

Happy planning!