Planning Not to Plan

As the wedding looms closer, it seems to be taking over our lives...  well, mine anyway.

If I meet up with someone for lunch, the first question out of their mouth is "how are the plans going?"  Following that, I face an internal struggle where I want to 1. not dominate the conversation with something so self-centered as my wedding and 2. explode with details that the FI is way past pretending to caring about.

Most of my spare time is spent with another kind of internal struggle, the kind where I debate relaxing and watching TV vs. working on invitations or researching rehearsal dinner locations or reading wedding blogs.

With all the emphasis on the wedding, its easy to lose sight of nurturing the relationship that led to the wedding.

Like this past Friday, some friends of a friend were DJ-ing at a coffeehouse in the South Side.  And, when I initially heard about it, I really didn't want to go.  But, the FI wanted to check it out.

So, after a yummy dinner at Pi, we headed to the Beehive.  We grabbed a couple espresso laced drinks and sat down to catch up with our friend.  Eventually, another couple of his friends showed up and we all started chatting.

We ended up staying a few hours, even longer than the FI originally planned on.  I was just having so much fun talking with people who we didn't know, who had very little interest in our wedding plans, who I could just listen to and talk with about regular people stuff.

It's amazing how refreshing it was to be focused on something so unrelated to the wedding for awhile...  Now I'm trying to be more willing to push myself to relax a bit and enjoy the stuff going on around us.  Like, when the FI brought up the idea of going to see Second City, who's going to be in town the weekend before our wedding, I did hem and haw a bit.  I thought about how many wedding projects might be left at that point.  But then, I thought about taking a few hours to laugh with the man I plan to spend the rest of my life laughing with.  And, I said yes, get the tickets.

Did you try to make time to do non-wedding related things with your partner close to the big day?  How did you make sure you didn't lose focus of the meaning behind the big day?