You have spent HOURS/DAYS/WEEKS/MONTHS planning this wedding and you want people to appreciate all your hard work! Right? When your guests show up and look around, you want them to be blown away with all the time, preparation, sweat, tears and MONEY (because we all know weddings aren’t cheap 🙂 that went into this thing! Like an obsession, it has you up at night and thinking about it all hours of the day until your vision goes fuzzy and you need another Aspirin to take the edge off your headache. You may be envisioning it like a theatrical mind-cinema and letting your imagination control the characters as they ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ at you in your gorgeous dress (and how SEXY you are!) and at how happy and in love you and your groom are. 🙂 After all, it’s going to be the best day of your life and nothing is going to ruin it for you!… except perhaps your own expectations.

Expectations can be your greatest strength, but they can also be your worst enemy if they aren’t realistic ones. From our experiences, the most common unrealistic expectation we have seen at weddings is a bride’s expectation of how her groom should respond when he sees her for the first time on their wedding day. 27 Dresses is the epitome of this expectation as she describes how when everyone else is looking at the bride, she is looking at the groom to see the look on his face (side note: I watched this movie purely for educational purposes). Thank you HOLLYWOOD! 🙂 If you have imagined that your groom will have that glint of teary-eyed joy when he sees you in your finest hour, you are not alone! I say that 90% of brides would prefer a teary-eyed groom over a trip to the day spa… even WITH those little cucumber slices that they put over your eyeballs. I have seen it written on notes handed to the groom telling him he better be crying when she sees him! 🙂 Even if the expectation is not spoken, it is somehow telekinetically communicated through the unmistakably intense desire of a bride who better get some tears from the man she is choosing to spend the rest of her life with! 🙂 Now, this may come as a shock so sit down if you aren’t already, here it comes; most guys don’t cry… MOST of them! You may be thinking ‘Well, Andrew, I’m sure MOST guys don’t but MY guy isn’t ‘most’, you don’t know MY guy’. 🙂 You may be right! I have seen a LOT of guys with tears in their eyes at the altar! BUT… 🙂 I know MOST guys’ reactions and they just flat out don’t cry. So why am I telling you this?

I was a groom once and I still remember all the pressure on my wedding day (and Emily was probably the LEAST expecting bride in the world!). I remember walking out to the altar to wait for the ceremony to start and I was pretty scared, I’m not going to lie! Not because I didn’t want to get married, but because it was a completely new experience and us guys like to feel in control, know what I mean? 🙂 When we don’t feel in control, it is a crazy vulnerable place for a man. Actually getting to enjoy seeing my bride walking down the aisle towards me is one of the last things on my mind. And crying in front of a bunch of our family and friends? Forget it! THAT is why most guys don’t get all teary-eyed when they see their bride for the first time. The pressure to perform is INTENSE.

When my beautiful baby girl was born in February 3 years ago, I decided I wasn’t going to have any expectations on myself and was just going to enjoy the moment. When the time came for her to come into the world and I saw her pretty little face for the very first time, my vision was so blurry with tears I couldn’t hardly see her at all! I was beyond overjoyed. It is still to this day one of the 3 happiest moments in my life 🙂 So what does this have to do with your wedding day?

Just let go. Allow your groom to react however he is going to. In fact, you can tell him that and it will probably help. Here’s what the Happy Bride would say; “Babe, I know on our wedding day that you are going to be under a lot of pressure and you may feel the need to ‘perform’ for me or everyone else and show how ‘in love’ we are. 🙂 I KNOW you love me. I KNOW that you think I’m beautiful! You don’t have to perform for me or anyone else. I just want to be married to you and I don’t care about all the rest of it (you have to mean it, though! :).” Something like that. I guarantee that he will feel the weight of the world off of his shoulders! You just freed him up to ‘THINK’ about how excited he is to marry you and to ‘FEEL’ how amazingly attracted and in love he is with you. In short, you just freed him up to enjoy the day WITH you which will make you one really, really Happy Bride!

Have you thought about doing a first look? For those of us who prefer to show our emotions in private (90% of guys!), it is much easier to do so without everyone looking than to do it in front of 200 people all staring and whispering to see if he is going to get teary-eyed. We highly recommend doing first looks for so many reasons (maybe I’ll write a blog about this to go more in detail). It’s not the traditional thing to do but they are often times some of our favorite photos from the day! Just food for thought.

Maybe I should have titled this post The Happy Bride/Groom 🙂