You can have a clean dress or a fun day — but you can’t have both.

When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we liked to ask each vendor what sage advice they had following their years within the wedding industry. One tidbit from our DJ that I like to to echo to clients is “You can have a clean dress or a fun day, but you can’t have both.”

If you’re thinking of shaking your fist in my direction, just hold off until the end. At that point if you still feel compelled, you can shake your fist right into my inbox and let me know that you’ll be keeping your dress clean thank you very much.

Let me preface this with some backstory. It poured on my wedding day, so we all remained huddled inside for the duration of the reception. My wife is a fastidious and tidy woman, and she taught multiple sessions of summer school just to be able to afford the dress she’d picked out — so far be it from me, in my $75 Men’s Warehouse shoes, to have suggested that she throw caution to the wind and stroll through the mud in her prized dress.

“This is the wedding advice we should have listened to”
— My wife, who, unlike me, is never wrong.

But that wedding dress is now in a box, where it will sit in a closet, shuffling from one shelf to another for eternity. And in the list of “I wish I’d…” that my wife I and I occasionally discuss about our wedding day, here is one that often comes up:

• I wish we’d gone out in the rain.

And here’s one she’s never mentioned:

• I wish my dress hadn’t gotten so grimy.

Yes, those pictures of us and our bridal party in the rain would have done a number on the clothes we never wear anymore. But there’s a good chance they’d also be some of the most joyful images of that day. And even if we disregard the pictures, I would love to be able to say Hey, remember that time at our wedding when we all went outside and danced in the pouring rain?

So if we could go back, would we trade a little wear on our clothes for whatever that experience could have been? You bet.

It’s about how present you are for one of the most important days of your life. You can fret about all of the bad what-ifs. What if the food gets cold. What if we don’t have enough time to get ready. What if the dress gets dirty. There will always be plenty to worry about.

So you’ve got to make a conscious decision to let some of that go. Let your dress get dirty, let things get a little off schedule, let Aunt Matilda give her unsolicited marriage advice.

You’ll get so, so much more out of your day if instead you let go and yourself enjoy it. Years (or even weeks) after your wedding day, those little things will certainly fade away.

So lean into the joy (and sometimes chaos) of your wedding. Let yourself be present and dive in to the adventure of it all.

You’ll thank yourself later. Even if your dress gets a little dirty.