Engagement is one of the happiest times in a person’s life. You’re with the one you love most in the world, looking forward to your wedding date and spending your lives together. It’s an exciting, beautiful, crazy time.

When you’re engaged, that’s everyone’s favorite topic of conversation. “When’s the wedding?” “What are your plans for the wedding?” “Don’t you just love wedding planning?” And so on and so forth.

For all of these questions, you smile and answer, “Yes of course, wedding planning is going so great! I love it.”

But here’s a little secret that few people will tell you, and you don’t even realize until you’re actually engaged: wedding planning is not that great.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love being engaged and getting to plan my life with my fiancé. I enjoy picking out pictures, choosing colors, deciding on flowers, planning out decorations, the whole works.

But the biggest question I’ve realized throughout the process is this: What is our obsession with weddings?

Let’s start with the basics. To be frank, weddings are freaking expensive. In the United States alone, the average cost of a wedding is $32,000. That’s the price of a new car.

And then there’s all the stuff. Flowers that will die after a few days, ribbons that are only going to end up in the trash, pictures that will get looked at for a few months before being tucked into a closet for years to come—the list goes on and on. The amount of stuff that goes into a wedding surprised even me, the girl who’s been planning her wedding since she was 12.

Do you want a photo booth for guests? What about engraved cutlery to cut your cake? How about a limo for the wedding party to get between ceremony and reception? Just when you think you’re towards the end of the stuff you “need,” you get into the stuff that you “should want.”

As I dug deeper and deeper into wedding planning, I started to feel dissatisfied and even slightly disgusted with the whole process. All this, for just one day?

My mother once told me, “Your wedding day is very important, and will hopefully be one of the best days of your life. But at the end of it all, it’s just one day. If you’re married, then it’s been successful.”

In our culture, we hold an admiration, wonderment, and an obsession with weddings. They have to be big, expensive, and glamorous—like something out of a fairytale. They have to be perfect, because it is our perfect day.

But life isn’t perfect, and that’s what makes it so wonderful.

Because the reality is that half of these big, expensive, glamorous weddings end in divorce. So why not focus our energy on what comes after the big day? On building a strong, happy marriage together.

I’m excited to get married, but I’m ten billion more times excited to be married. I don’t expect to spend countless time and money trying to make one day of my life perfect, when the beauty in life is in all its imperfections. I do expect to spend countless moments and energy on building a life of love, joy, and happiness with my future husband.

Our obsession with weddings is nothing more than a shooting star: sparkly, eye-catching, and gone in the blink of an eye. But an obsession with marriage is like the gentle presence of the moon: steady, substantial, and overwhelmingly beautiful.

So next time I’m asked, “Don’t you just love wedding planning?” My answer is going to be, “Yes, but let’s talk about my marriage. Because that’s where the true love comes from.”