No matter the budget, location, or theme, planning a wedding is inherently stressful. Something will go wrong, a financial issue will come up, or a frustrating family member will make some trouble. Instead of taking it upon yourself and your fiancé, why not hire the internet to be your wedding planner? That’s what Jen Glantz did, according to Insider.
After receiving far too many unwanted opinions on her upcoming wedding from seemingly everyone around her, Jen took action. She created the website finallythebride.com, where anyone can vote on every decision in her wedding, from the budget to the guest list to the dress itself. New questions are released on the first of the month, and voting closes on the 15th of the month, with result soon to follow. So far, audiences have been reasonable with their wedding ideas. They voted for Jen’s wedding budget to be between $15,000-$30,000 dollars, and they elected not to have an open bar during the reception.
While some might think this was a spur of the moment decision, this actually came as a natural progression from Jen’s previous wedding experience. Since 2014, Jen Glantz created her business Bridesmaid for Hire, where women would pay her to attend their wedding as a bridesmaid. Since that time, Jen had attended hundreds upon hundreds of weddings for total strangers. Jen told Insider, “I know it sounds crazy but strangers have let me be part of their wedding for the past 5 1/2 years. It would be strange if I didn’t let the strangers become part of my wedding.”
Readers may be wondering how her fiancé is receiving this one-of-a-kind procedure. He has been nothing but supportive, according to Jen. He knows how overwhelming she feels the wedding planning process is, so why not adopt an unorthodox method to fix that?
Jen Glantz’s goal with this experience is to show how little control couples (and especially brides to be) truly have over the wedding itself. She notes how, “There’s no playbook. Even if you plan your wedding from A to Z, things go wrong. I’ve seen things go wrong. I’ve been the person dealing with the things that go wrong, so I feel like this is my way [of realizing] you have zero control. It is my gut feeling that this is the right thing to do.”
This could be the start of an exciting new wedding trend! Regardless of whether other couples adopt this democratic system, Jen Glantz provides a refreshing reminder that the process of planning a wedding should be exciting, and it’s totally okay not to have everything go exactly according to plan.