Let's face it. Your wedding is not going to be perfect. There are just too many factors: weather, busybodies, tardy DJs, ripped dresses, food allergies, insect mating season, bridesmaids on their periods, puking swans, kitchen fires…anything could happen on your special day. Hopefully, if anything horrible happens, you'll either forget about it or it will turn into a funny story. But it won't be perfect.

My big day certainly wasn't perfect. It was supposed to thunderstorm and we'd planned an outdoor wedding. Our slideshow we'd wanted to play while the guests were waiting at the reception cut out after only my pictures were shown. The DJ was late, there weren't enough people to serve the food, and I was so stressed the entire day about people having a good time. I'm a worry wart and a people pleaser, so it was my natural tendency to want the guests to enjoy my wedding, kind of at the expense of making my own memories. All in all the day went well, though, thanks to thoughtful panning by my mother and hard work by family and friends.

I know how important your big day is to you. You want beautiful, memorable, maybe even elaborate, maybe very simple, but in the end-stress free. I can't promise you a stress-free wedding, but I can provide ideas to alleviate some of that stress.

Weddings are hard work, and sometimes we just don't know how to prevent the problems that typically come up in weddings. These problems, like feedback through the speakers or running out of food, really affect the guests. And as much as we would sometimes like to think, our wedding is not 100 percent about the bride and groom. Our guests, the ones who we thought were important enough to invite and who gave up their day (or weekend) and cash to support us in our futures, deserve a nod or two as we make plans and reception hall schematics. And when it goes well for the guests, it goes well for you. So this guide is full of tips on making your wedding smooth sailing for your guests. I guarantee that if you prevent a lot of the problems that are typical to wedding guests, it will seriously cut down on issues for you, too. After all, a lot of the decisions we have to make revolve around how they affect everyone at the wedding, so this guide has revamped the way we do weddings, offering new solutions to common problems. It will help you be better informed in those areas, and make the whole wedding planning process better for you.

With that being said, remember that you can't please everyone. No single person - not even you, the bride (or in some reader's cases, the mother of the bride) - gets everything they want. So right now, I want you to stop worrying about making everyone happy all the time.