Wedding planning is a combination of battlefield dispatch, horror yarn, and fairy tale all wrapped into one.I didn't truly realize this until I was on a flight to California talking to a perfect stranger. I mentioned in passing that my fiancée and I had just booked a hall for our wedding reception and suddenly I was talking to a man in his late fifties about wedding planning. My seatmate was talking about all the details of organizing his wedding"”from an era when the Blondie and ABBA were contemporary"”as though it were yesterday.

"If you thought booking the hall was hard," he told me, "Wait till you have to deal with the caterer."

That was the moment where I learned I was part of a much bigger world than I had previously known. It was the world of those who have had to plan a wedding.

As weddings go, ours, which is scheduled to happen this August, has probably been no more or no less difficult than any modest wedding. My fiancée and I like to joke that I'm the girl in the relationship"”I seem to be the epitome of the stereotypical bride who wants a dream wedding while my poor wife-to-be sighs at the mounting bills like a stereotypical 1950s male. There have been ups and downs"”moments where we have taken to talking about the "W word" so as to not inflame our anxiety levels and moments where we talk to each other excitedly wishing that August would come now. There have been differences of opinions, compromises and glorious promises of the day to come. And, frankly, I was expecting all that.

What I didn't expect was that so many people had similar stories of their own. Stories like "We ended up getting someone to take photos who was billed as "˜Canada's best nude photographer' and he did it cheap because he wanted to build a non-nude portfolio." Or "We just had a small get-together for 30 family and friends and we still spent $1000 on wine." Or "I never thought two intelligent human beings could talk so much about what font that would best show off the letter "˜J'." Or "If you were to just rent a limo for four hours, it would cost you half of what it costs once you say the word "˜wedding'." Or "Whatever you do don't use butter icing on the cake in the middle of summer." Or "We had the biggest argument of our life together over whether it was okay if he added one of his hockey buddies to the guest list."

It's like becoming a member of a secret club; a place where people speak the secret language of wedding planners, vellum paper, seating charts and music for the first dance. Whether the wedding has five friends on a beach or 200 people in a cathedral, everyone who has been married (even briefly) or who has been touched by wedding preparations has their own story. It's a combination of battlefield dispatch, superheroic adventure, cautionary fable, horror yarn and fairy tale all wrapped into a single narrative.

And that makes a lot of sense to me"”at least now I'm a part of the club.

I realize now that there is no experience more intense, more absurd, more fraught, more bewildering, more fascinating and more exciting than planning one's wedding. It's one of those rites of passage that touches on so many areas of our adult lives"”our familial relationships, our aesthetic needs, our financial realities, our hopes in the present and our aspirations in the future. We put all of these things onto one day of our lives.

It's such a bizarre thing when you look at it"”all that planning, expense and emotion pegged onto that one day. And yet, I would argue, imperfect as is, it's those very rites that make us human. These ceremonies of pomp and circumstance objectively cannot possibly fulfill all our desires (and, as we keep being told, are not emblematic of the actual experience of being married), and yet, they go a long way toward expressing who we are and what we want to be as a "we". It's something we share with a communion of saints across the ages, that untold number with tales of DJs gone horribly wrong, bridesmaids dresses the perfect shade of cornflower blue and that magic moment when two people gaze into each others eyes and say "I do".