Adjustment

My cousin Kara just got married recently. She is about six years older than I am and has graduated from college and is ready to settle down. She has been planning her wedding for almost a year. It took a lot of time and effort to make her wedding day perfect. Just finding the dress took six months. On the day of the wedding tons of things went wrong but in the end it all worked out and it was beautiful.

I got a chance to talk to her and ask her some questions about how she felt about everything. She told me that the biggest adjustment she had to make was knowing that she was all grown up. She felt like the real world had finally come along and she was no longer dependent on her parents. That scared her to death. She said that she loved David her fiancй more than anything and she knew she was making the right decision, but the fact that she was going to be with him forever took some time to get used to also. Not only did she have to worry about the planning and spending, she was also becoming very emotional about everything as the day drew closer. Her parents are divorced so that made her planning process even more difficult. Each parent gave her a certain amount of money but neither would really get involved in helping her get everything together. She lives in St. Louis and both of her parents live more than a eight hundred miles away from her. So she felt basically on her own from her family.

Another major adjustment for her was becoming part of another family. She said that she met so many different people from David's side of the family she couldn't remember them all. She had to get adjusted to his style of family life and how they did things differently from her family. She had to learn how to seriously compromise as well. The actual planning of the wedding she had to accept David's ideas and her mother in laws wishes as well. She couldn't do everything her own way, which was very hard for her. She felt like it was her day and she wanted it a certain way, but she had to learn that she was sharing this day with someone and she had to give up some things and so did he.

One of the things she had to compromise with him was where the wedding would take place. His mother is a reverend at a church in St. Louis and he wanted her to perform the ceremony. Kara didn't really want it that way but she agreed because that was something she had to compromise.

Not only was she adjusting to a new family she had to take on the responsibility of purchasing things for the reception and ceremony. She had never really done anything on her own before so to have this huge work load was something new to her. She had to get organized and budget her money. She had to accept the fact that she couldn't have everything she wanted for the wedding because she didn't have all the money in the world to spend on it. Just the invite list was a major task for her. She couldn't invite tons of people because she didn't have the money for that. She had to sit down and really thinkabout who she wanted to be there. Another problem was choosing the food, the band, the centerpieces just about everything to