5 Things I Learned About Decisions When Planning A Wedding

Clearly, I'm qualified to talk about marriage.

I got married 3 months ago.

Getting married, on the whole, is possibly the most consequential decision any of us will make. This is the person who we will - ideally - spend the rest of our life with. Several studies show that people in stable marriages live longer¹, have more stable careers², are generally happier³, and overall wealthier⁴ than those who are single. Having been married for all of 3 months, I can absolutely vouch for the benefits of DINK life.

I love helping people make better decisions, and marital advice is definitely above my pay grade, but here I am sharing 5 things I learned about decision-making when planning the wedding anyways.

1. Decisions made by committee are tedious

Normal weddings already require an insane amount of decisions: guests, venues, decor, catering, sound, outfits, color schemes, vendors, party favors, hotels, etc. A multi-day Indian wedding with guests from 5 continents ups the ante significantly.

All of the things to organize required a whole group of people to come together for approval. Multiple back and forth discussions between my wife and I with vendors, family, and friends were needed for nearly every single thing listed above and more besides. Naturally, frustration began to set in at certain points because of how tedious the process was.

The tedium occurred because we wanted to make sure things were done well. Sure, we could have just decided on something ourselves, but involving other people gave us a second opinion, a sanity check to make sure we weren’t making a huge mistake. I might be fine with super spicy food, but our wedding guests were probably glad I asked someone with no spice tolerance to taste the catering options with me.

The tedium of a decision made by committee is the strength and weakness of bureaucracy: many opinions coming together gives a greater chance of a good decision, but adds a lot of time to the process. By contrast, autocratic decisions are quick - one person in charge making every decision means fewer points of friction, but the quality of those decisions are entirely dependent on that one person.

2. Delegation Is Your Friend

There are so many different decisions to be made at any given point during a wedding that it wouldn’t be possible to do it alone. I’m not fussy about flowers or particular about photos. These are not areas that I wanted to be involved in, and even if I was? I wouldn’t be a good decision-maker because I had so little awareness of what good floral arrangements or photography looked like. These are decisions I would delegate to my wife, friends, and family.

However, delegation during a wedding (and other times besides) often necessitates some form of check-in with the final decision-maker(in this case, me and my wife). Delegation simplifies my decision-making because I no longer need to deal with the 50 small decisions that are involved with a task, I just need to deal with the one singular decision of approving or requesting changes on the final plan. This is the one of the benefits of organizations: tasks can be delegated to others away from those with more to do.

3. Your urgency does not equal my priority

Especially closer to the actual days of events, there was a constant stream of people looking to me for information, logistics, and decisions. Some of those things were urgent, some were important, some were both. It took constant work to sift through the flood of messages and emails to make sure that I was responding first to those that were

The separation of urgency and priority into two distinct dimensions of decisions is not new. Famously, this is the technique known as the Eisenhower Matrix, used by former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to manage his workload. The best resource I can find to explain this is the wonderful people at Farnam Street. In a nutshell, the technique is simply going through and identifying the things that are both urgent and high priority.

This image source is from Wikipedia

The tricky part here is that other people will constantly be pushing their priorities onto you. Not being shaken from your personal matrix is how people avoid making mistakes of misclassification in their mental Eisenhower matrix.

4. Relationships come first

Ultimately, the whole point of a wedding is to celebrate relationships. If it was just about the actual act of getting married, why not elope? The reason people have weddings is because they want to celebrate their important relationships. Not just the newly formalized relationship between the married couple, but also the important relationships between the guests and the couple.

From a purely financial perspective weddings make no sense - that money could be used towards a house or other appreciating assets - not to mention the amount spent by guests. Guests take valuable vacation time, spend money on flights, hotels, outfits, Ubers, and wedding gifts because they care about their relationship with the couple.

Often times when making decisions, the tendency is to move towards metrics. The spreadsheet warriors of the world love to push the idea that data-driven decision-making is the correct way of making decisions, assuming that only numerical data matters. Reducing the human experience to quantifiable metrics ignores the qualia of the human experience: what it means to feel.

All of this is to emphasize that some things are more important than P&L. Healthy decision-making recognizes that.

5. An Audience of One

It’s a cliche but everyone knows that the most important person at a wedding is the bride. The groom’s job is largely to show up and say the right name. My wife reads my writing and I have no qualms in saying that she was the most important person at the wedding. And this largely is reflected in the buildup to the wedding, when nearly every decision ended with her final approval.

Ultimately, good decision-making processes have someone to make the final decision. That person has to be curious and consider all possible angles (my wife is genuinely great at this), and then take on the responsibility of having final say. As the saying goes, the buck needs to stop somewhere.

The importance of appointing someone as the final say is often downplayed because there are many examples of poor decisions by this final decision maker. The HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) Effect is well documented to make worse decisions⁵. However, systems that are created to minimize or distribute the responsibility of a leader fall into the same patterns, except without a formal structure to account for the influence of a leader.

At the end of the day, someone has to decide. Understanding who the final decision maker is and their preferences goes a long way towards having your decisions approved - especially when it’s your wife.

---

If you liked this, consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. I need to please the algorithm gods with “engagement” and “visibility” so that I can help people become better decision-makers for a living. You also might like to read some other things I’ve written:

• Why Your Brain Isn't Absorbing Anything

• Dynamics of Desire

• How the Thought Industry Is Failing You

• Identity Determines Value

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12612516/

2. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/job-turnover-wage-rates-and-marital-stability

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214804314000214

4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1440783305058478

5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/26/data-driven-decision-making-beware-of-the-hippo-effect/