CONFESSIONS of a Luxury-Wedding PLANNER - Lies, panic, and ponies

Sunday mornings, for wedding planners, are reserved for prayer. Not because it's a particularly pious profession but because that's the day when clients who were married on Saturday figure out if they're happy or not.

- XOCHITL GONZALEZ

Should they choose unhappiness, Sunday is when they decide whom to blame. And Monday is when the emails come.

I say "decide" because weddings are funny affairs-tense, expensive, fraught with emotion. They are revisited-by the couple, by the family, by the person paying the bills-time and again. They mark the beginning of a couple's new life but sometimes of other things too: family feuds, broken friendships, a long hangover of fiscal regret. So even if the party went great, on Sunday the wedding planner prays.

Will the email be full of joy and praise? Or will it be one of complaint? Back when I was a luxury-wedding planner in New York City, my business partner and I once got an email from a bride, written as she helicoptered off to her honeymoon, saying that her wedding had been a "transcendent experience." A call from the bride's mother directly followed. "Repeat after me," she said. "I am bad at my job. I should never do this job again." Sometimes the clients just need to vent. Sometimes they threaten to sue.

THE WORK OF a luxury-wedding planner is only partly about the planning. Yes, you help the couple plan what you hope will be a stunning event-but your main job is to be a professional wedding friend. You're the person who cares if the bow on the favor has swallow or inverse tails, or if the maid of honor is being a passive-aggressive bitch when none of the bride's other friends wants to talk about it anymore. The family is paying you to care as much as they do.

When I became a wedding planner, no one in my own family could comprehend my utility. My grandparents, who raised me, had what was called a "football wedding." They rented the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and piled tinfoil-wrapped heroes on a table.