Planning a wedding - especially a destination wedding - is so

In the words of Stassi Schroeder—“Planning a wedding – especially a destination wedding – is so much harder than I realized.”—we hear the lament of one who has tasted the gulf between dream and reality. A wedding, in its essence, is the celebration of love, yet in its planning it becomes a trial, a labyrinth of choices, costs, and burdens. The destination wedding, envisioned as a paradise of beauty and escape, reveals itself to be not only joy but toil, requiring patience, endurance, and the strength to carry many unseen weights.

The ancients would have nodded in understanding, for they too knew that great celebrations demanded great labor. Consider the marriage feast of Alexander the Great in Susa, where he wed Roxana and commanded mass weddings between his officers and Persian noblewomen. Though the vision was magnificent, the logistics were vast and straining, requiring resources, diplomacy, and endless coordination. What appeared to the crowd as effortless grandeur was borne upon the shoulders of countless struggles, just as Schroeder discovered in her own planning.

There is a deeper truth hidden here: that love itself, though radiant, cannot be divorced from the labor that sustains it. The wedding is but the first of many challenges, a mirror of the marriage that follows. To plan, to endure, to face obstacles together—these are not merely tasks of an event, but rehearsals for the covenant of life. The hardship Schroeder names is not an accident, but a teacher, whispering that all things of worth require struggle.

We may also recall the festivals of ancient Rome, where days of celebration masked months of preparation. Behind the music, the feasts, and the processions, there were laborers, priests, and planners whose sweat gave birth to spectacle. So too, every wedding that appears effortless has beneath it the hidden cost of toil. To realize this is to embrace humility, to understand that beauty is often carried on the back of difficulty.

Thus, her words endure as a lesson: do not despise the hardship of preparation, for it is proof that the moment is worthy of care. In the struggle to plan, there is also the shaping of patience, and in the challenge of the destination wedding, there lies the wisdom that even the most radiant visions demand effort. For what is hard-earned glows brighter, and what is built through labor endures longer.