Wedding blues/disappointment

I've been lurking around here for a while but this is a throwaway account.It's been two weeks since I got married and I'm struggling with some post-wedding blues. I just need a space to process but I also really want to hear if this is common. Has anyone else experienced the same thing?The main things I'm depressed about are 1) I don't feel a sense of congratulation or like the day really happened, and 2) I'm disappointed with how the day went and still trying to come to terms with the idea that it's over.First of all, at my job I'm both a web designer and a project manager. When everything began, I didn't want to over-plan the wedding because I normally plan everything and I wanted to relax for this one. I got a wedding package from a local resort because it included a wedding planner and I wanted things to be done right without me micromanaging. Where we are, it's notoriously difficult to get things done properly because local people have a very laid-back attitude toward projects.FH (husband now!) and I are citizens of two different countries and we live in a third tropical country that some people would regard as a "destination wedding" country. We really wanted to get married, but doubted anyone would make it in person due to covid travel and quarantine restrictions, so we decided to have a ceremony with just some immediate family members. Our planned wedding was very simple: 5 guests, no bridal party, ceremony on the resort grounds, dinner reception at the resort restaurant without any dancing or schedule of events. And that's why the wedding package was appealing: a low-stress way to get all the details together.The wedding planner asked me for my preferences on flowers, cake, arch, dinner, etc. She had a poorly formatted Word doc to keep all this stuff, so I made her a stylesheet for everything, pictures included. It wasn't long. We signed off on it.To cut a long story short, nearly every detail I asked the wedding planner for didn't pan out, and a lot of details around the wedding didn't pan out either.Even though our wedding was small, I wanted to have the feeling of guests or at least their well-wishes, so I (and my mom) put together a list of 150 people we would have invited and asked them to send us a card that FH and I would read on our wedding day. We included pre-addressed pre-stamped cards and envelopes so everyone could send something back. Only a handful of these arrived from FH's side because my MIL brought them with her when she flew over. None of the ones from my side arrived. We gave people six weeks to write and mail the cards, so it was disappointing the night before the wedding to check my PO box and not find anything there.There aren't any bridal shops in this country I know of, so I bought a dress online and shipped it here. A local tailor messed up the straps during an alteration, so I took the dress to a seamstress who fixed the straps, but hemmed the dress poorly. (I'm taking it to another seamstress now, post-wedding, to fix the hem.) I don't think anyone at the wedding noticed, but it upset me because I paid a lot for the dress.The wedding planner recommended a makeup artist. At the trial, I waited an hour and a half before she told me she forgot her makeup and couldn't do it. I ended up doing my own wedding makeup (which went fine, but a hassle). The planner's recommended hairdresser flaked and I found my own hairdresser (who also did a bad job and my mom redid it). The wedding planner didn't follow up on our wedding license and when we finally met with our officiant 7 days before the wedding he told us we had to do some paperwork ASAP or we wouldn't get married. Cue three days of 3-hour roundtrips to the government office to do the paperwork.On the wedding day, nearly all the details ended up different from the stylesheet. I think I could have ticked off "default tropical wedding" and skipped the planning entirely, that's how different it was. I had requested a tropical bouquet with red and orange local flowers, no palm fronds, purple, or yellow. It came back with purple, yellow, and palm fronds. (Maybe they missed the "not this" heading?) The planner negotiated a good price for me for orchids on the arch and when I showed up at the ceremony they were fake (definitely NOT what I would have settled for). The cake was supposed to be vanilla and caramel with fresh fruit and came back a completely different recipe, like Christmas pudding. The dinner was completely different. And that one baffles me, because the planner provided sample menus, I customized one, she and the chef signed off on it, and then they made a completely different dinner with all the sides I hoped not to get.During the ceremony, we only had 5 guests who were all standing around us, so I asked the planner not to use a microphone or sound system. Over-the-top for our ceremony size and I think microphones are ugly. When I walked in, they handed me a microphone.None of those things are huge issues, though. What WAS a big snafu was that the wedding planner did not follow up with our photographer. I found a local photographer I loved, and FH and I did an engagement shoot with him a month before the wedding. We confirmed the date with him and sent his info to our planner, who had worked with him before. On the wedding day, at 1pm before the 5pm ceremony, she showed up and told me "he said the bride had not confirmed with him and he was already booked at another event and couldn't come." She found another photographer last-minute. But good gosh, what do you hire a planner for if they won't check with your vendors at least a few days before the wedding to make sure they'll show up?So... I've been feeling a lot calmer about all of these things since, but on the day of the wedding I nearly had a meltdown.It started when I couldn't get ahold of the planner until about noon when she arrived at the resort for work. I was feeling really jittery about the details because everything up to that point had been a struggle to nail down. FH tried to help me relax by telling me she was a professional, but I had a bad feeling about it.When she told me about the photographer it was a huge shock. Out of all the details it was the one I cared about most. I'm a designer and I really wanted good pictures. And I had specifically rejected their resort photographer because his photos were poor. I think I almost burst into tears when she told me.At that point, I started obsessing about the details. I wondered what else was going to go wrong. No one had told me when the flowers were going to arrive, how we were going to get across the resort from our rooms to the ceremony, and lots of other details, and my project management side kicked in. Wedding planner told me "relax, stop getting uptight, just enjoy your day."Then there was some bullshit from my dad. My mom is an angel but my dad is a narcissist. He asked whether the ceremony included giving away the bride. I had specifically removed it. Planner told him it didn't and he asked her to add it so that he could give me away. Rather than add any drama, I decided to ignore it, but once the planner left, my dad threw a fit and I had to calm him down before the hairdresser came.The hairdresser was in a rush because she was going to her friend's birthday party after doing my hair. She was going so fast she burned my ear with the curling iron and knocked over her coffee cup. After she left I pulled her style out and asked my mom to redo it. My mom did a great job and saved the day there.At this point we had only one hour until the ceremony for me to do my own makeup and the replacement photographer hadn't arrived yet. I was getting really nervous he might not show up, and sad because we were missing a lot of the beforehand prep photos I wanted.I started doing my own makeup. My dad took photos, unfortunately by really getting in my face, and I told him three times to go away but he didn't. FH was not getting ready in the same place or else FH would have helped out. At this point the flowers arrived and they were the wrong flowers so I just asked them to put them in the fridge to keep them fresh. There's a definite expression of disappointment on my face in one of our impromptu pictures when I got them. To be fair, the flowers were pretty, they just weren't what I asked for.A car arrived to take my mom, MIL, and younger brother away to the ceremony location, and my mom helped me into my dress last-minute while the car was waiting outside. The officiant charged a lot if the bride didn't show up on time so we weren't going to make him wait. And then they went off.And this is the part where I really started feeling some depression about the wedding. I think the photographer had given me a bad shock, followed by my dad's drama, the hair, and the flowers, and the last straw was that I didn't have anyone else (mom, bridal party, friends) to help me with the final minutes. The replacement photographer arrived (this is 15 minutes prior to the ceremony) and took some pictures of me putting on my shoes. My dad vanished. We only have one photo of his back while he's walking away from the photographer. It's a small hotel room but I don't know where he went. I had a problem with my necklace getting tangled around my veil and had to fix it myself. And I think I almost started crying again, first because I was stressed about the details, and second because there wasn't anybody there to help. The photographer wanted to take pictures of my train and I couldn't help him lay it out right, so it was messy. I felt really alone.A car arrived and took me and my dad down to the ceremony location, where I spotted the sound system and the fake flowers. We waited in the car because the photographer was trying to catch our guests "processing in" and he couldn't catch it right so he was making them do it again. I think my thought was, "They can't get ANYTHING right around here" and unfortunately after that I couldn't get into the right mindset for the ceremony.I wanted to feel emotional about getting married and this really special moment, but I think if I had allowed myself to get emotional I would have just started sobbing, so I shut everything down. When I went into the ceremony I disassociated from what was going on. I felt like it wasn't my wedding, and I kept over-focusing on the details to distract myself from feeling bad about it. I don't have a clear memory of the ceremony. I dimly remember reciting my vow to FH but not feeling anything about it. I kind of remember what he said to me but mostly I remember that he was using the microphone (this is so dumb but that's what I was going on in my mind). In the pictures I have a rigid expression. When it was over a few minutes later I finally felt some relief.Our post-ceremony portraits were a bit of a bust. Our wedding was on the beach at sunset because I wanted sunset pictures, but the beach faced directly west, which cast really harsh shadows. I had picked our first photographer because I knew he could deal with it. The second photographer couldn't, and I couldn't turn off the design side of my mind that was noticing everything he was doing wrong while posing us. We did get a handful of good photos out of it, but I'm editing them all myself now.At the dinner I started to lighten up and feel better. It was another disappointment when the food and cake weren't as planned, but to be fair to the chef, everything was delicious and my guests loved it.When we finally wrapped up for the night after dinner and went back to our rooms, my husband exclaimed, "That was amazing. You did such a good job. Is it everything you hoped for?" and I burst into tears. I think I cried for the next few hours, just getting all the pent-up stress out. To FH's credit, he didn't ask me what was wrong until I had calmed down, and then listened patiently to all the things. He said he was really sad I hadn't enjoyed the day, but everyone else had, so on that count it had been a success. (This is true. I keep reminding myself of it.)The next day my family flew out to give us some space. FH's mom and brother stayed for another couple days while waiting for their flight, which gave this weird "waiting around" feeling to the aftermath. Our honeymoon didn't start until four days after the wedding, and then we just spent three more days at the resort before going home.It was all kind of surreal and anticlimactic. And now, two weeks afterward, I'm having a really hard time accepting that it happened. I can't get over this feeling that there's some way I can do it over again, "properly", where I can ignore the details because they're all correct and I can focus on getting married. I also can't get over this absurd feeling that because it didn't go "right," FH and I aren't really married yet. I really wanted to savor the vows and I missed the moment. I've avoided putting down his last name as mine on restaurant reservations because - this is weird - maybe I'm hoping that if I don't admit it, I'll get a chance to do it over again. I never had a huge rush of exhilaration over getting married or being married and I feel cheated of that, somehow.I don't think any of these feelings are rational, but despite my best efforts to talk myself out of them, they're all still here. None of these things are really serious issues but I can't seem to realize that, emotionally?I also really miss having a party, a lot more than I thought I would. I'm an introvert and I've never been into big parties. But because of covid and the distance, we skipped a lot of other things: having a bridal shower, getting gifts, any of my close friends at the wedding, a big reception. I did have my mom and younger brother, which is fantastic, and it would have felt so much worse without them. But it makes me sad we didn't receive any of the letters I had asked for. I kind of want to be recognized and know that people are celebrating FH and me, even from afar.I also feel upset that I spent so much money on a wedding planner to get things right and take the stress off, and the exact opposite happened. This is a small place and I know where the florist and bakery are, etc. It probably would have been way less stress to organize a 7-person wedding myself. I'm trying not to dwell on this, but I'm a careful budgeter and it makes me slightly ill to think about how much I spent on details I didn't get.Sorry for the long post. I could really use some advice from anyone else who has had a similar experience, even if the circumstances aren't exactly the same. Did you feel depression afterward if details went wrong? Did it take time for the feeling of "being married" to settle in? If you had a small wedding due to covid and you missed a big celebration, were there ways you made up for it?If you got this far, thanks for listening. It really helps me to write this out. via /r/weddingplanning https://ift.tt/36zA3jD