By Elizabeth Hekimian-Williams

You’re engaged and planning a wedding.

It’s certainly an exciting time! However, be aware and be careful to not let this happen to you… Some couples encounter a problem in the months and weeks before their wedding day. One or the other begins to feel disconnected to their partner.

Why would this happen if you are both in love, happy and perhaps spending even more time together than usual? Several things can factor into this feeling of disconnect…

Often it’s because couples end up spending less quality time together. Some couples spend less time together during the wedding planning phase, and others may even seem to spend more time together. However, the time is increasingly shared or diverted to others and task-oriented towards completing wedding arrangements through meetings with vendors, family, and friends. If you let it, it can be easy for time alone as a couple, connecting with each other and having fun, to dwindle.

Chores that must be done while wedding planning also take up a good portion of the couple’s enjoyable and romantic time. Chores are not necessarily fun, yet they must be done. Planning the logistics is often heavily placed in one person’s hands (traditionally the bride’s). This can also make one person very busy with tasks and to-do lists, not only distracting them and taking them away from their partner, but also feeling more resentment if they start feeling upset that they are doing more than their partner. Even when brides and grooms help each other to do the many tasks involved in planning a wedding, they are usually focused on just getting those things done, not in sharing intimate moments of meaningful interactions together.

In other cases, the disconnect can be related to the sometimes difficult process of negotiating through arguments and problem-solving with each other to finalize all of the decisions needed to realize a successful wedding day.

It’s hard to feel enamored with each other if you’ve been disagreeing on a line item on your list for the past several days.

What are some ideas that can help you both avoid feeling disconnected or alienated from each other while planning your wedding?

Schedule private time together for an enjoyable activity regularly (at least several times per week). Lunch together, mini-golf, time in the bedroom cuddling or more, and beach-time swimming and smooching all count. So does a half-hour of uninterrupted “just talking” time that does not involve wedding task talk or blaming talk.

Seriously consider using a wedding planner to handle many of the aspects you are trying to do yourself. If you don’t think your budget allows for this, develop the to-do lists together with your partner and agree early-on as to an equitable division of the tasks, before the going gets rougher.

Try to keep and encourage a sense of humor, comedy, and mischievousness with each other while out running errands and doing mundane chores off your to-do list. Keep the mood light and playful as often as possible while doing the chores. For example, try putting on a comedy show on the TV as background noise, listen to a funny song or to a compilation of these, have some jokes ready to tell each other, and make it a point to find and share funny things you’ve seen on video websites or on other social media with each other while working on wedding-related unexciting or repetitive-type tasks. The idea is to make your time together less boring, joyful and more fun.

Here’s one more idea for taking a break from the mundane and decreasing the feeling of disconnect with each other. Take a premarital preparation course. This is just-the-two of you time. And a premarital preparation course typically includes new topics for discussion that help you each learn more about each other. This type of communication often increases feelings of intimacy and connectedness.  Some premarital courses are found online and offer more interactive and lighthearted content and exercises (for example, ours at http://FLPremaritalCourse.com). This makes it easier to fit into your wedding planning schedule and also improves your enjoyment of spending this quality time together- all while you both gain marriage boosting skills that further you towards having not only a dream wedding, but also a dream marriage!