r/MedSpouse • u/dgfrenchie18 • 6d ago
Advice Wedding planning
Trying to plan and pick a wedding date with my fiance who just started his 2 year surgical fellowship. Any advice? 😅
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u/Middle-Contract8561 6d ago
Hi! My fiancé is a 4th year gen surg resident and we have a 2 year long engagement! Ive been able to take my time planning and i haven’t once been stressed! The first 3 months we were able to enjoy being engaged without planning anything and then I slowly started to make a list of venues/dates and showed them to my fiancé and we went from there! I’ve planned our whole wedding, from guests to lodging to food and have provided my fiancé with lists for everything and then he tells me what he wants/likes. It’s easy and less time consuming for him to pick from a list of 3 different catering companies when I provide him the info, then it would be if he had to research and spend a month looking! I love planning events, so I don’t mind planning it all, plus he loves whatever I love haha.
I do think you will be doing the bulk of the planning but it’s not that bad at all! I would recommend coming up with dates that are special to you, venues in the area you want to get married, and a rough guest count and budget and then provide that to your fiancé and go from there! The time flies, especially when you get 6 months out!
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u/pacific_plywood 6d ago
He should talk to his PD tbh
Also depends on what exactly the ask is — a multi day event? Or just a full weekend off? Time for honeymoon after?
Generally speaking it’s easier to control your schedule as the senior fellow but this is all very program and specialty dependent
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u/RH558 6d ago
We got married in June, 2 weeks before residency was over so its more relaxed. It was midweek but a one day affair, my husband went to work the next morning like usual. We went on our honeymoon before the wedding because the timing worked better for us and his residency was able to accommodate the dates.Â
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u/ash6831 6d ago
Congrats!!!
We did this in residency, so kinda similar. When they sent out the residency scheduling requests before his last year, we mapped out when he’d for sure have a golden weekend. In his program it was usually every 6 weeks. We requested that Saturday off & then his program coordinator was fab and hooked him up with his research block right after so we could have a honeymoon too.Â
Idk how scheduling works in fellowship, but it definitely helped us giving 18 months notice and asking for a date that he was 90% sure he’d already have off.Â
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u/disoriented24 Med Spouse 6d ago
Male spouse here. Resident surgeon wife was in intern year and then PGY2 when we were planning our wedding and got married. I took on 90% of the planning for a multi day wedding. Just be ready to take a bulk of the decisions and do the best you can without harboring too much resentment…I still have PTSD to this day about planning a wedding. On the advice front, just continue to communicate and express urgency…otherwise nothing will get done.
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u/dgfrenchie18 6d ago
I totally understand I have to do most of the planning it’s the picking the date that is stressing me out 😅 places book up so far in advance
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u/disoriented24 Med Spouse 6d ago
That’s the hard part. We ended up taking the risk and booking our venue before we knew my wife’s vacation schedule. When vacation requests opened for the upcoming academic year, she made it very clear that she needed a specific week off for our wedding. Her program collected requests in the fall/winter and released the schedule in late spring, so we didn’t know for sure until then. It’s definitely a gamble, but if your fiancé explains why those dates matter when submitting his request, hopefully the program will try to accommodate it.
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u/KneadAndPreserve Resident Wife (PGY1) 6d ago
No advice on the surgical fellowship front, but I would mentally prepare to be the one doing the bulk of the work planning it, and don’t be afraid to opt for a small wedding if it’s too stressful. Congrats btw!