All You Really Need Is Love by Brad Paisley

"All You Really Need Is Love" wedding video

Anyone who says that planning a wedding is a stress-less, easy, enjoyable and wonderful experience either hasn’t planned a wedding or is the kind of person that sees a glass that is half-empty as over-flowing.

Now I’m not saying that there isn’t enjoyable parts of planning a wedding, but in helping plan me and my wife’s wedding and in my friend’s experiences I have yet to find anyone who have not faced unwanted difficulties and challenges in preparing for the wedding celebration. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not venting some deep, unresolved issues from my own wedding experience, I just think it’s interesting how the craziness of planning a wedding sometimes makes us lose sight of the point of it all, the marriage.

Wedding in America is an industry. There are magazines, websites and stores dedicated to creating the perfect wedding. There are vendors including caterers, photographers, florists, DJ’s, musicians, wedding coordinators, wedding planners, design specialists and pretty anything that you can imagine, however small the detail in a wedding, there’s a person who spends their lives just working on that.

It’s a little ridiculous . . . ok, it’s a lot ridiculous. If you call up a hotel and tell them, you are having a company banquet, they will give you a price but if you call the hotel again for the same space with the same number of people at the same date and tell them it’s a wedding reception, the price will double. This is not an exaggeration and is a symptom of this wedding “thing” that our society has created.

My wife and I found it funny that during our wedding planning it seemed that we were worrying more about the wedding than our marriage. At the end of the day, the marriage is the point of the wedding, and not the other way around. One of the things that helped us keep this perspective was Brad Paisley’s sage advice that “All You Really Need Is Love.”

Brad Paisley’s concepts for his songs are hilarious. Here you have a friend asking Brad if he thinks that he and his fiancée have what it takes to be married and Brad says, “yes” because all they really need is love. The song has a nice medium pace as Brad explains how happy he is for the couple, then it kicks in high gear as he goes into his list. He lists all the stuff that you need for the wedding and the friend and his fiancée’s mood starts to change into a panic.

After Brad’s list, he slows things down and notices a weird expression on the couple’s faces as they look kind of pale. Try writing down all the things that Brad lists off while he sings and you’ll start to get the overwhelming feeling that comes with planning a wedding, which is exactly their “expression” on the couple’s face. Brad goes on with his second list, notices a tear on his friends’ eyes, and misinterprets their feeling of shock as happiness.

This song has a sense of joy and teasing. Paisley doesn’t sing like he’s trying to be the specter of doom but instead he sounds like a person who in genuinely happy for his friends and wants to help. The up-beat tempo and the amazing instrumental break all contribute to a general feeling of celebration.

As Paisley sings his list of wedding needs he doesn’t bogged down. He has a light tone and smoothly flows through the words. That’s exactly how people should try to take on all of these wedding tasks with a sense of humor and a wink in the eye because at the end of the day it really is all about love.

It’s the love between a man and a wife and love that is shared with friends and family. We cheat ourselves by focusing energy on pleasing just the bride, doing only what the groom wants or making decisions solely on what the parents want. Yes as a man, I was annoyed that every time we talked a vender they would only talk my wife. I’m not saying that it would have made me happy if they only talked to me and ignored my wife instead. That would probably get me even angrier.

What I think is idea would be a level of respect all around. If you truly love someone, you don’t spend your entire day doing every little thing just to please to them and always let them have them their way. Love is about being partners, sharing in the experiences and responsibilities of life and it makes me sad to think an event that is suppose to be about joining two people together often ends up being about just what one person wants. That seems to defeat the point of what that special day is suppose to symbolize.

My brother and his fiancée have less then a week before they get married. It’s been interesting watching them put together their wedding. I find myself sometimes thinking, “well, that’s not how I would do it” and then I remember that I had my chance to do it my way and it’s not really important how the details are done. Most people who come to a wedding don’t really care about the bar package, the chair coverings or the centerpieces, they are just happy to be there to share the day.

Through helping out with my brother’s wedding, I’ve gotten a level of perspective on my own wedding experience. There were some things that I was obtuse about and irrationally decisions that I made. I’m not proud of that fact and I hope I didn’t cause too much stress to my wife, my in-laws and my parents. I’m sorry if I did. (If you haven’t figured it out yet, I wasn’t exactly the kind of groom who was satisfied sitting in the corner while everyone else figured out what the wedding day would look like.)

However, I think I did the best I could, and it took time for me to figure out that it wasn’t all about my wife and I, but it was about everyone who was there on that day. It’s an indescribable feeling being in a room full of people who want nothing but to wish you well and help you celebrate your lives. If that feeling isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

The planning was sometimes stressful and not all that much fun but think about it, if planning is the best thing about the wedding, something is wrong. The wedding should be the best part, so I think it’s ok if you don’t love planning your wedding.

Ed and Laura, this Saturday, don’t forget, all you really need is love and I know there will be plenty of love between you and around you on your wedding day. Love will make that glass not only seem half-full, but will fill it until it actually is overflowing.