After the wedding

After the wedding, planning stops and administration begins — and nobody prepares you for that. What is left are tasks that all look small and together take weeks: thank-yous, photographs, invoices, borrowed items, and depending on your decision a name that has to be changed at a series of places.

The most underestimated are the photographs. Weeks often pass between the day and the finished images, and then the real work begins: choosing, sharing, making an album — and settling who may show the pictures where. What happens to guests' photos is best decided beforehand, not once they are already somewhere.

And then there is the part that occurs to nobody as a task: a year of planning ends and ordinary life comes back. For many couples that is a strange emptiness, rarely talked about. This section covers both — the list that genuinely has to be worked through, and what comes after it.