Should Your Wedding Be the Best Day of Your Life?

"Your wedding is going to be the best day of your life!" Even if you've only been engaged for five days, there's a good chance you've heard that emphatic proclamation as many times (accompanied by plenty of squeals of joy). But how accurate is the statement? Furthermore, should your wedding be the single greatest day of your life? Here's the thing: Your wedding will be great, full stop. But...there's also a chance that one or two things might not go exactly as planned. What happens then? In the famous words of Voltaire, "The best is the enemy of the good." While weddings are amazing celebrations, be wary of letting the pursuit of perfection eclipse the wonderful event you're planning.

Pro Tip: Use The Knot App, which has a to-do list customized based on your wedding timeline, to reduce stress as you approach wedding planning.

In this story: Wedding Pressure | Wedding Expectations | Overcoming Wedding Disappointment

Wedding Pressure

I'm a wedding expert with a wealth of wedding day tips, not a healthcare professional. So I spoke with a few therapists to better understand wedding planning stress and the mental factors at play when people say your wedding will be the best day of someone's life. "Brides and grooms alike can place so much hope onto a wedding, expecting it to fulfill every dream they've ever had," observes Margo Call, an Oklahoma-based licensed professional counselor. "It can create unrealistic expectations and eventually lead some people to feel down or depressed after the glamour and attention of the wedding fades."

Similarly, Melanie Neff Yarborough, a licensed independent clinical social worker in Alabama, encourages to-be-weds to consider what would happen if the wedding isn't the best day of their lives. "Society teaches us that there are certain milestones along the way, such as graduating from school, getting married and having kids that are the most important times in someone's life. But as I've seen through my work with clients, this is not always the case. When someone experiences a big life change, such as a wedding, and it isn't everything they've dreamed, they then will feel like something is wrong with them or missing."

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Wedding Expectations

Not only is there external societal pressure for things to feel perfect, but there's also a scientific explanation for these feelings.

Call me a contrarian, but I have a reaction to high expectations that you're probably familiar with. Whatever the circumstances—be it a friend hyping up the latest movie or my neighbor's endless raving about the hip new bistro around the corner—inflated expectations set me up for disappointment. Say, for example, I end up rating said new restaurant an 8/10. If I'd eaten there with little-to-no knowledge ahead of time, going in with expectations for a 5/10, I would've been impressed—the spot was way better than I anticipated. However, my friend's endless praise had me anticipating a 9/10 spot, so even though I enjoyed my meal, it was worse than I'd expected, and I left feeling a bit underwhelmed. That's the power of unrealistic, or unfairly inflated, expectations.

I've always believed in this concept, but had never heard of any hard science to back it up until recently. I was listening to Atomic Habits, by James Clear, while driving home from hanging out with friends. His explanation of this phenomenon was so spot-on that I had to pull over and write down his words. At long last, I knew I wasn't alone in my thinking about the drop-off from expectations to reality. In his book, Clear discusses dopamine (a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation) and dives into what makes it spike.

Clear explains that when something positive happens to you (like celebrating your love for your partner), you get a hit of dopamine. And as that positive scenario repeats itself, you also get hits of dopamine during anticipation. "Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it," Clear writes. From your proposal to the engagement party and wedding showers, you've been getting more and more hits of dopamine, yet these celebrations pale in comparison to your wedding. As such, the levels of anticipatory dopamine your body is experiencing ahead of your wedding continue to grow. "The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike," he writes.

Ok, ok, but why does this matter? "Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation...This is one reason that the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it," Clear writes. Because when your anticipatory dopamine levels outweigh what you actually experience on your wedding day (like my restaurant scenario), you may end up feeling deflated (and confused about why you're feeling that way). Whew—what a mess! Society places pressure on you, you (understandably) get excited and hopped up on dopamine. That isn't a formula for success; it's a formula for disappointment.

Neff Yarborough has seen this kind of drop-off (or postwedding blues) with couples: "I've heard from recently married people that there can be a bit of a letdown after the wedding. There is so much hype around this day that when things start to taper out into 'normalcy' it can feel confusing," she notes.

So what are you left to do? You should, reasonably, be excited for your wedding. "A lot of mental health is affected by expectations, and whether or not life meets the standards and visions that we have in our own heads," Neff Yarborough reiterates. "So it is sometimes best to hold these expectations loosely. Don't get me wrong: Be excited for this day and look forward to it! But hold these wedding expectations of perfection and 'the best day ever' lightly."

To do so, put your excitement and wedding priorities into context and understand that the wedding is simply one piece of a greater whole. "At the end of the day, you want to not just be planning an event, but a life you can share beyond the wedding day," advises Call.

Overcoming Post-Wedding Disappointment

By now we've established that there's a strong chance your wedding might not be the best day of your life (even if you happen to plan it on one of the most auspicious lucky wedding dates). But rather than letting unmet wedding expectations defeat you (or leave you with wedding regrets), it's time we discuss why this might actually be a good thing: because it sets you up for success in your marriage.

You know how people joke about folks who "peaked in high school?" I always get sad when I think about that, because I can't imagine spending the next 60+ years looking back on the proverbial glory days (i.e. claiming "my wedding was the best day of my life."). Wouldn't you rather each day and experience be your "best day so far" and forever be in a state of becoming?

In her aptly named memoir, Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama says: "Now I think it's one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child: What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that's the end...For me, becoming isn't about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn't end...At 54, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be." While this isn't inherently a wedding anticipation quote, there's still much to be learned from it.

How beautiful is it to be able to say, as you make your marriage vows, that your love and partnership are still in progress and you hope they always will be? Holding this perspective will certainly set you up for success as you tackle your after wedding to-do list.

"My hope for prospective brides and grooms is that your wedding is only the beginning of how your love will hopefully grow over time," says Call in regards to wedding expectations, pressure and disappointment. "A wedding is about connection and commitment, not perfection."