The truth is, nightmare brides and grooms come in all forms. Sometimes it’s a rotten personality, sometimes it’s stress-related, and sometimes it’s something you have no control over, like pregnancy hormones. After she had fired her first two planners, I got a call from a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant and just three months away from her wedding day. Yikes, should have been my first thought — after all, I could be the third planner she’d fire — but I felt for this woman and wanted to help her out. Well, no good deed goes unpunished. Her vendors hated her so much that many of them called me threatening to break their contracts and give her the money back just so they wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore. I couldn’t blame them, but begged that they stick it out for my sake. I now owe a lot of favors.

I can’t give couples all the credit for driving me insane. When you marry someone, you also marry their family, and the same applies to wedding-planning — especially when parents are the ones footing the bill. It’s difficult enough trying to please just the bride and groom, much less the whole family and bridal party (who sometimes expect to be copied on every email). With so many cooks in the kitchen, often nothing gets done. Mom wants roses, bride wants sunflowers. Sister has a friend who wants to DJ, groom insults her taste in music. Everyone’s a critic. I once had to excuse myself from a yelling match that ensued between the bride and her brother because he called her an “entitled brat” for booking a photo booth for the reception. Apparently their parents never gave him the same luxuries when he got married two years prior. Awkward.

Hands down, the most painful part of the job was dealing with budgets. On behalf of wedding planners everywhere, the propaganda on “fabulous and frugal” weddings needs to stop. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no money snob. I, myself, tied the knot with a tiny budget of $5K. It can be done. But I had a brunch, not a sit-down dinner. An iPod, not live musicians. The toilets at my venue stopped working and the manager did nothing to fix the problem. Things went wrong because I got what I paid for. There’s no use sugarcoating it — weddings are expensive, and managing budgets is really more about managing expectations. Sometimes $100K is a lot, but sometimes it’s not — like when you have 400 guests. Don’t act surprised when I say you can’t afford a videographer.

A friend once insinuated that it must be fun getting to spend other people’s money, but that couldn’t be farther from how I (or most wedding planners) do business. It’s not a prepaid shopping spree with a green light to make the client's wedding as Pinterest-y as possible. We make recommendations, track expenses, and try our damn hardest to steer couples in the right direction. If we’re lucky, they follow our advice, but there are always the couples who don’t stick to the plan. Most vendors complain about the cheapskates, but the real downers for me were the fiscally irresponsible. The ones who wiped out their life savings to pay for a famous photographer. The bride who maxed out three credit cards on a designer gown. I never, ever encouraged this kind of spending, but ultimately it was never really my decision to make.

I thought I had thick skin before I started planning weddings, but you need to be bulletproof, quick on your feet, and a problem-solving wiz to do this job without curling up in a ball and crying. Every experienced wedding planner knows no wedding goes off without a hitch — a hard pill to swallow since we’re perfectionists who plan every detail down to the minute. Whether tiny or catastrophic, something always goes wrong, and more often than not, the finger is pointed at the planner. All we can do is put out fires before anyone notices. Whether it’s a tipsy guest bouncing into the cake table and sending it tumbling to the ground, realizing someone threw away the box that had the marriage license, or the maid of honor indiscreetly sprinting down the aisle in the middle of the ceremony because she forgot the rings in the bridal suite, you start to feel like you can’t win. I knew it was time to call it quits when I found myself dreading wedding days instead of feeling excited.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I left my successful career as a wedding planner at the altar. And while starting over is scary in a different way, I'll take uncertainty over "Cupid Shuffle" any day of the week.