How to Cancel Your Wedding

Nobody plans a wedding expecting to un-plan it. I certainly didn't. I had a date, a state, a theme, a guest list, signed contracts and paid deposits, and I had a TV interview where I told the entire country that letting strangers pick your wedding details was a great idea.

Then it was June, the wedding was in October, and I understood that I was going to have to mail out un-save the dates.

I have worked hundreds of weddings for strangers since 2014, more than fifty a year for years straight. I have watched weddings get moved, shrunk, postponed and called off entirely. And then I got to do it myself, which is a different kind of education. So this is the guide I wish someone had handed me: what to actually do, in what order, when the wedding you are holding is not going to happen.

"If you don't cancel now, it will get awkward. People will have to muster up the courage to tell you they can't come. You don't want people to have to do that."

Step OneDecide faster than feels comfortable

The single most expensive thing I see couples do is wait. Not because waiting costs more in deposits, though it often does, but because every week you wait moves the decision from you to your guests. They start making their own plans. They start deciding whether to tell you they can't come. And then the wedding gets cancelled slowly, by other people, instead of quickly, by you.

When I finally said it out loud, my fiancé agreed immediately, and I yelled at him that it was all his fault. That is a normal part of this. The argument is a waste of time and you will have it anyway. Have it, then get to the list.

Step TwoCall your vendors before you tell anyone else

This is the order that saves money, and almost everyone gets it backwards. Guests can wait a week. Your venue cannot.

• Read the force majeure clause first. Then call. Walking into that conversation already knowing what your contract says changes what you are offered.
• Ask to move the deposit, not to refund it. A vendor who cannot give your money back will very often give you a date, a credit, or a smaller version of the same service.
• Call the venue, then the photographer, then everyone else. Those two have the tightest calendars and the least flexibility once they rebook.
• Get every agreement in writing the same day. A kind phone call is not a contract amendment.
• Do not cancel your insurance yet. If you have wedding insurance, the cancellation itself may be the claim.

Step ThreeTell people once, in one place

You do not owe 140 people 140 individual phone calls. You owe your parents, your partner's parents, and your wedding party a call. Everyone else gets one clear message that goes out at the same time.

Say three things and stop: the wedding is not happening on that date, here is what we know about what happens next, and here is where we will post the update. Do not apologise for four paragraphs. Do not explain your reasoning to people who are going to have opinions about it, because they will have those opinions either way.

And then put your phone down. I built an entire website so that people could give me their wedding opinions in an organised way, and I still had to learn that the opinions do not stop arriving just because you built somewhere for them to go.

Step FourDeal with the guest list you were dreading anyway

Here is the strange gift in all of this. Almost every bride I have worked with has a guest list containing people she cannot explain. The cousin you see every five years. The old boss who likes your LinkedIn posts. The second cousin's ex-husband, Dan, who your aunt texted the details to before you could answer her.

When I asked my readers about this, 76% said they had invited people they wished they hadn't, and 91% said they regretted not inviting someone. Almost nobody gets that list right the first time.

A cancelled wedding is the one moment where that list resets and nobody thinks anything of it. If what comes next is smaller, it gets to be smaller on purpose.

Step FiveDecide what you are actually mourning

A few weeks in, the logistics finish and the feeling starts, and it is worth being precise about it. Sometimes you are grieving a party. Sometimes you are grieving a version of yourself that was going to be a bride in October. Sometimes, and this is the one nobody says out loud, the relief is louder than the grief, and that is information too.

I spent three years telling the person I loved that I never wanted to get married, and then years begging him to forget I ever said it. My therapist asked me whether I wanted to get married or whether I thought the world wanted me to get married, and I answered "both," which was true and also not an answer.

Cancelling my wedding was the first time I had to work out which one it was. That turned out to be worth more than the deposits.

"Do you want to get married, or do you think the world wants you to get married?"

Step SixDo not rebook until you know what you want

The instinct is to immediately put a new date on the calendar, because an empty space where a wedding used to be is uncomfortable. Resist it for a month. The couples I have watched handle this best are the ones who let the second wedding be a different wedding, rather than the same wedding with the numbers changed.

Some elope. Some do the small version and keep the party for a year later. Some discover that the thing they wanted was the marriage and not the production. All three are fine. None of them is the failure version.