Your wedding day is supposed to be one of the best days of your life, but with the pressure to make everything perfect and keep everyone happy it's no wonder many brides are left feeling stressed rather than excited in the lead-up to their big day. A survey carried out among 1,000 newly-married women by Getting Personal found that four in ten women got "fiercely competitive" when planning their wedding day, while even more wanted their nuptials to be better than their friends.
Making their day look its best for social media was also a major factor for many brides, with three in ten admitting they were highly concerned about how their wedding looked on Facebook. Combined with worries about the weather, difficult seating plans and family politics, you could almost begin to question why anyone would want to get married at all!
Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway play stressed-out brides in 2009's comedy Bride Wars
However, one solution put forward by the online gifting retailer is just to focus on making the day your own. "There's definitely a trend now for every wedding to go one step further than the norm," a spokesperson for the site said. "Though it's stressful, it's the personal touches that really add that special something to a wedding day, so that everyone can enjoy it as much as the newlyweds. We can see how important this has become to brides as we now sell more personalised wedding favours and accessories than ever before."
MORE: Five easy ways to save money on your wedding
See the top 20 causes of wedding stress for brides-to-be
- Unwanted wedding guests
- Bridesmaids complaining about dresses
- Negative comments about bride's choices
- Family politics due to step-parents
- Mother-in-law taking over
- Complaints about the seating plan
- Not enough help planning the wedding
- A disappointing hen-do
- A misbehaving best-man
- Photos being tagged on Facebook
- The bridesmaids putting on weight
- Pressure to look great in the dress
- Stories from the stag-do
- Looking her best in professional photographs
- Choosing food everyone will like
- Bad weather
- Bridesmaid outshining the bride
- Too many children coming to the wedding
- Wanting a better wedding than a friend's
- Not wanting guests to get bored
What would you be most stressed out about?
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