It's not that we have pressure to stick to tradition or to be more offbeat (yet), we just have so many people who are SO STOKED to FINALLY be able to do things that they've always wanted and expected to be able to do–so juggling all of those dearly held expectations is getting more and more a part of this process.

Like PPs have said, my dad is also hell bent on walking me down the aisle. I wasn't feeling that too much until I remembered that it's a Jewish tradition for both parents to walk the bride down the aisle. This sits better with me as with both parents there, there is no implication of me being given away. But I've nixed the father/daughter dance and he's dealing with that. We'll dance at some point, just not as an event. My grandmother would cry if she did not have a corsage–I was not planning on any corsages and now we have to have 5 of them or Grandma will cry. How can I argue with that? So instead, I sigh and add more money to the feather lady's bill and it's done so I can do fun things like homework and house cleaning.

I try to remember to pick my battles–I'm not going to fight over something just so I have control over it. I will reserve my energy and verbal melee skills for the things that really matter, and the other things, I will do my best to work for a solution that makes everyone happy. If I can afford to throw money at something to make it go away, I will. If I can't, I'll figure it out. I see so many people picking one extreme like trying to make everyone happy or the other extreme like refusing to budge one little bit, even over something small. I try to avoid that because I've never seen an extreme behavior strategy work effectively. We try to keep the things that we determined were important to us to the forefront and let the little things that may or may not matter to us or others work themselves out. It's hard but it's all about balance and thinking about something before responding/emoting about it. No one's perfect, my dad and I totally fought like cats and dogs over the aisle nonsense but it obviously ended up ok.

After it was all said and done, we survived the blow ups, the wedding was a success, we included what we wanted, left out what we didn't, and we can look back on it fondly.

We are able to do so because I set boundaries about how involved in the decision making process my mom was. We didn't do wedding dress shopping, she didn't go to the cake tastings, and I created my own invitations that didn't mention my parents. It helped that I wasn't taking money from her for the wedding, since that really makes things complicated!

It may sound cruel to have cut her out of so many traditionally mom and daughter wedding things, but we never would have made it without killing each other.

I feel this huge pressure to be the bride that my mom "couldn't have afforded to be" when she got married, even though that's not what I want. We're super early in our engagement, and there have been no fewer than 5 blowups already due to expectations.

My FH and I are at odds over having one or more friends serve in the the "master of ceremonies"/officiant role for our non-religious ceremony. (We're doing the legal ceremony beforehand, with no guests present, at a city hall.) He thinks we should just appear in front of everyone and say our vows. I would like a little more direction–that's why I like the idea of one or more friends in official roles, explaining what's going on, guiding everyone on what to do. We may be offbeat, but not all of our family and friends are.

So we have somethings to work out between us.

My dad was totally fine with my idea, which was to walk down the aisle by myself. (My husband also walked down by himself, so there was that bit of egalitarianism going on.) The way we incorporated the parents during the ceremony was like this: husband and I first did a rose exchange with each other, and then we each presented a rose to the other's parents to acknowledge and thank them. The minister also asked each set of parents to pledge their support with a "we will." There was no giving away of anybody Maybe something like that would work for you?