When I first met my boyfriend/fiancé/husband, we kind of knew we would want to spend the rest of our lives with each other. But neither of us said anything aloud in fear of it being “too soon”.

But neither of us are great at keeping our feelings in when it comes to each other anyway. He ended up proposing about 9/10 months after meeting me.

We were so happy. We were engaged! We wanted to get a house immediately and due to some legal issues, we decided, let’s just get married. That’s our end goal anyway and eloping seemed like quite a grand idea.

And we thought that was that. But life doesn’t work like that. Soon after, everyone started asking us when our wedding would be. To be honest, I’ve never wanted that huge, over-the-top wedding with bells and frills.

I wanted something simple, small and casual. Easy, right? I was so wrong. When we first revealed our plans to his parents, his dad was pretty excited to take on the wedding planning.

It turned out to be quite the opposite of what the two of us wanted, so we politely took over the planning.

The thing about weddings (and marriages), especially in the Asian cultures, is that it’s never really just about the two of you. It’s about the two of you and your families.

Thankfully, my parents were pretty laidback about it and said, do whatever you want, it’s your wedding. (I laughed internally at that. “My” wedding.)

No Asian wedding is ever the bride & groom’s wedding. It’s always about the family, about traditions, about keeping up appearances.

Not that there is anything bad about those things. “Face value” is important to many. Just not to the two of us.

But our families do matter. We can’t just say, to heck with it. We’ll do what we want. We often find ourselves so conflicted between what we want and respecting our parents’ wishes.

Because of that, much of the wedding planning has just been... slow and on low priority.

I’m about 8 months off from my actual wedding day. We’ve booked our venue - we’ve only been to two wedding venues in KL to celebrate our friends’ marriages. We chose the one that seemed least rigid and conventional.

I have my make up artist, the very talented, very magnanimous @joychong, who is also one of my precious bridesmaids. But that’s about it.

Nothing else has been planned. I think I’m going to have to enlist some help soon.

Stay tuned for more wedding rants on the lifestyle section of the website.