Thinking of Postponing the Wedding

Please excuse this long post, just need to vent and get some much needed advice...)

Ever since I was a little girl, making Barbie & Ken get married a hundred different ways in my room, I have been dreaming of my own fairytale wedding someday. Well, now I’m 5 months out from the big day, and I have never in my life been so incredibly stressed or depressed, not to mention my anxiety has gotten out of control with regular panic attacks and no amount of meditation, exercise or Xanax to calm the anxiety.

We’re getting married in Los Angeles even though we’ve been living 3.5 hours north in San Luis Obispo for the past 2 years. The FH and I both were born and raised in LA and 90% of our guests are still in that area, which is why we chose a venue down there. We assumed it would be easier for the 2 of us to journey down to LA than for 90% of our guests having to travel up to us for the wedding (not to mention, I didn’t really like any venue near us anyway).

Anyway... per booking the venue, it didn’t occur to me that we would have to hire vendors near our venue (baker, caterer, hair stylist, makeup artist, photographer, etc) so having to constantly drive back and forth to LA on weekends, after a full week of working, has become exhausting, and we still have many more weekends of this. Not to mention, the cost of the wedding has just gone crazy. Yay high prices found everywhere in LA. My parents are paying for the wedding, they initially budgeted about $12,000 for the wedding. Then after booking some stuff and researching, that increased to $17,500 for them. Now, I’m finding out that invitations are going to be way more than we thought, as well as hair and makeup, and the cake. My parents are stretched to their financial limit, so now my FH and I will having to come out of pocket ourselves about $2,000-3,000, which we don’t have at all. (We’ve endured a horrific year with injuries, medical issues, car accidents, etc. that has drained our savings... as it is, we had to cancel our dream honeymoon because we can no longer afford it. So having to find money ourselves to cover the added wedding costs is giving me more anxiety than I can handle).

Now tack on the fact that my MOH is in Colorado, one Bridesmaid is in Texas and the other Bridesmaid is several hours east from me, and I feel like I have no help in this planning process. My mom tries to help, but it just ends up in us fighting because we have completely different tastes.

Anyway, I am so utterly stressed and exhausted, that even though Save The Dates have already been sent out, I’m really feeling like postponing our wedding by an entire year (moving from October 2018 to October 2019). Has anyone else had to postpone? Is it embarrassing? How do you handle this? Or instead of postponing, should we just cancel everything, say eff it and let Elvis marry us in Vegas? I just don’t know what to do, but I do know the wedding I’ve been dreaming of forever, I am now completely over.