Those are strings, Pinocchio

(source)

Before we started planning The Backyard Wedding, I always assumed wedding planning had little to do with preparing for the actual marriage. I think now that I was wrong. Wedding planning is rife with lessons that must help your marriage, from treating people with respect even when you disagree with their opinions to handling people's feelings carefully in heightened emotional circumstances to standing up for yourself to learning to compromise. In a way, planning a wedding, especially a small one like ours, sometimes feels a bit like navigating a minefield of manners and expectations. I just hope I make it to the other side as a person who is both kinder and stronger.

Here's one example of a tricky issue I'm hoping won't blow up in my face.

Because our budget is so incredibly miniscule, we are, in turn, so incredibly grateful to have many talented close friends and family members who are willing to do double duty as our vendors. In modern wedding parlance, these people are more commonly known as friendors, and we are SERIOUSLY lucky to have them as friends, vendors and wedding guests.

On the other hand, we know some talented people who we aren't particularly close to and definitely wouldn't count among the nearest and dearest we're limiting our guest list to. Several of these people have offered to help in any way possible with the understanding that they won't be invited, and for that, we are also incredibly grateful. Believe me, we are both aware and appreciative that these people are making generous offers and expecting nothing in return. They are awesome.

Well, all of them except for one. Without giving away particulars, one individual has already insisted on contributing their particular talents. Because this person tends to only make offers with strings attached (hence the title of this post), we haven't committed to accepting this offer, even though these talents would be helpful. Let me state also that this person has a history of saying particularly cutting things to me and making me feel less than stellar, which isn't something I want to be dealing with on my wedding day.

Yesterday, I found out that this person has been telling a certain group of my acquaintance that (a) this person is the only one invited to the wedding out of this certain group, and (b) this person is planning the entire wedding. Both (a) and (b) are major falsehoods. The Backyard Groom and I had decided that in order to keep The Backyard from overflowing that we wouldn't invite anyone from this group. We also decided that we didn't want or need a wedding planner.

Now I've got members of this group of acquaintance upset with me, and I've got to figure out some classy way to disabuse this person of these two wrong notions. How do you salvage a situation like that?

Like I said, wedding planning is full of life lessons. I'm approaching this like an exam I hope to pass.

Have you had to deal with difficult people?