(Marriage Before the Wedding)

At some point during planning, you’ll have a disagreement that surprises you. Not a huge one, necessarily, just one that leaves you both a little rattled, because it came out of nowhere over something that shouldn’t have mattered that much. A guest list cut. A seating chart. Whether his mom’s suggestion gets used or gently set aside.

Here’s something worth knowing going in: that’s not a sign anything is wrong. Gottman Institute research on marital conflict has found that roughly 70 percent of relationship conflicts are unresolvable, meaning there’s no clean right answer waiting to be found, and that a large share of those recurring disagreements cluster around money, parenting, and in-laws. Wedding planning happens to touch two of those directly, and gestures at the third. You are, in a very real sense, getting an early and compressed preview of the kinds of conversations you’ll keep having for the next several decades. That’s not a bad thing. It’s useful information, arriving early. If you’re still early enough in planning that you haven’t hit this yet, we wrote about what to do first after getting engaged, and what can wait, which touches on some of this too.

The instinct, when a planning fight happens, is to try to solve it. Find the right compromise, land on the correct answer, make the tension go away. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t, because the disagreement isn’t really about the seating chart. It’s about whether you feel like your voice carries real weight in decisions that are supposed to be shared.

Gottman’s research has a name for this: accepting influence. It doesn’t mean agreeing with your partner, or giving in, or losing an argument gracefully. It means being genuinely open to the idea that their perspective might be right, or at least worth real weight, even mid-disagreement. Couples who struggle with this tend to dig in fast: defending a position, explaining why they’re right, waiting for their turn to talk instead of actually hearing the other side. Couples who do it well tend to ask questions before they respond. Not performative ones. Real ones, aimed at understanding rather than rebuttal.

You’ll get a lot of practice at this during planning, whether you want it or not. Your parents want a longer guest list. Their parents have opinions about the ceremony. You disagree with each other about the budget line that matters most. None of these have a factually correct answer, which is exactly why they can spiral: there’s nothing to look up, no expert to settle it, just two people who each have to decide how much room they’re willing to make for the other’s perspective. That skill, more than any specific decision you land on, is the thing that’s actually being built during this season.

There’s a second piece of this that’s easy to miss, because it doesn’t look like conflict at all. It’s smaller than that, and it happens constantly during planning: one of you sends the other a venue listing, or a font option, or vents for two minutes about a vendor who hasn’t called back. Gottman’s research calls these bids for connection, small attempts to be noticed and responded to, and found that couples who consistently respond to these moments with attention and warmth build the kind of trust that carries them through conflict and stress. Wedding planning is an unusually bid-dense season. You’re both thinking about it constantly, which means you’re both reaching toward each other constantly, in small, easy-to-miss ways. A quick glance at a text, an actual answer instead of a distracted “looks good,” noticing when your partner is stressed about something before they say so directly: none of it is dramatic, but it adds up fast, in either direction.

We’ve spent almost twenty years photographing weddings, and alongside that, time as volunteer marriage coaches, which means we’ve had a lot of front-row seats to both. The couples who seem the steadiest on the actual wedding day, the ones who move through a stressful morning without it fraying them, tend to be the ones who’ve already practiced this during planning. Not because they avoided disagreement, but because they didn’t treat every planning disagreement as something to win. They treated it as something to understand. If you’re also thinking through who stands up with you on the day, we wrote about why a smaller wedding party is often the better call, which leans on some of this same idea of honoring people well rather than just making a decision.

None of this means you need a plan for handling conflict, or a script for responding to bids, or anything that turns your engagement into homework. It just means that if a planning conversation goes sideways over something that seemed small, that’s not a warning sign. It’s the marriage, showing up early, doing exactly what marriages do.