Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway answers your questions and helps relieve wedding stress. Please e-mail your questions, wedding challenges and column ideas to The Wedding Goddess.

By Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway

Although weddings can be stressful, they can also be very healing. Sure, your wedding is a chance to dress up and party with friends and families … and you should enjoy that! It is also a time of gathering people together in the spirit of love.

Most importantly, your wedding is the sacred threshold to the life you will share as a married couple.

Here are some tips for holding it together, relieving wedding stress and staying close:

1. Recognize that it is easy to get sucked into the vortex of wedding planning stress, and overwhelmed by pressure and expectations of those around you.

You’ve got to include stress management, self-nurturing, and time to chill out as an integral part of the wedding planning process. Do things that help you stay centered.

2. Realize that everyone has something to say about your wedding. You’ll be showered with congratulations and gifts, and bombarded with unsolicited advice.

Make an agreement to make decisions together, and back each other up. Support each other!

3. It is a rare family that does not have a “Debbie Downer” who throws a little wrench into your wedding plans.

You have to set clear boundaries, and also learn to deflect the sometimes-negative vibes from well-meaning friends and relatives. You can’t please all the people all of the time… so please yourselves.

4. Getting married can stir up a lot of emotions. The process itself sets forth period of growth and change that can be nerve -wracking. Unresolved emotions may come to the surface to be explored.

Be prepared to do some inner work along with all the external preparations. Honor and address the fears that arise. Trust they are natural.

5. Our culture places a tremendous emphasis on having a great wedding and not enough on having an awesome marriage. It's okay to be temporarily obsessed and yearn for the perfect wedding -- but you have to keep your eye on what's truly important.

Don’t give the wedding day so much power! Step back and realize, the most important part of the day is not the day itself ... but that you leave the altar in the arms of the One you love … the One you look forward to building your life with.