This week Lily is sharing some behind scenes of her upcoming wedding day. Listen to this fun “Ask me anything about my wedding” episode, inspired by the Date Brazen Instagram community! You’ll hear what Lily is doing differently and how she plans to bring main character energy to the special day.  

Links:

Date Brazen on Instagram

Date Brazen on TikTok

Show transcript:

Lily: Hey I’m Lily Womble former top matchmaker and founder of date brazen. After setting up hundreds I realized that with coaching women could match themselves better than anyone else ever could. With my unconventional feminist approach, I’ve helped women around the world build courageous and self trust built love lives. And now I’m here to support you get ready because I’m about to share the exact steps you need to attract a soul quenching partnership and feel amazing about yourself along the way. This is the date brazen podcast. Hello, gorgeous friends. Welcome to another episode of the date brazen Podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here. Let’s shout out another listener review on Apple podcasts. Okay, as it stands right now we’re at 99 ratings and reviews and the latest one Christina five stars, said so relatable. I feel like Lily hits the mark. Every single episode she puts out Yes, Lily always feels authentic. And you can tell she wants her listeners to feel seen and learn from each episode that is so true. I really want you all to feel seen and heard and cared for in this podcast because we’re a community and we are learning together and growing together. And so I’m so glad you’re here. I get DMS from people every single day that say oh my god, the podcast changed my life. And it brings me so much joy that whether or not you ever like officially, quote unquote, work with me, your life can be changed by the tools that I share in these episodes, your life can be changed by starting to listen to yourself and trust yourself, like I encourage you to do in these episodes. And so let’s keep it going. I’m so glad. I’m so glad that we’re here together. And if you wouldn’t mind, I would love to get over 100 ratings cuz like, that’d be super fun. So go to Apple podcasts and leave a review for the date brazen podcast. It’s so easy. You just go to Apple podcasts, you go to the date brazen podcast, you scroll to the bottom, and then there’s a little button that says write a review. So yeah, I would love that that would mean so much to me. And now today, we’re getting a little bit personal in this quickie episode. I am letting you in on what’s happening in my life, how it’s feeling what’s happening, I do not have a plan, just here showing up talking to you about maybe the most, like intense in a good way season of my life, yet maybe like tied for one of the most fun intense seasons. So I want to spill all of the details about it and like what’s happening and what’s coming up. If you’re listening on Tuesday, April 25, then my wedding is eight days away. Or like nine days or I don’t even know the wedding is May 4 I’m getting married to Chris, the most incredible human on the planet. Partner, the man that I choose, we are getting married. We’re getting legally married at the courthouse on April 28. So by you, by the time you listen, we’ll already be legally married. And then on May 4, we’ll have a ceremony and celebration in Brooklyn with our closest friends and family. That’s wild and so fun to pull back the curtain a little bit. We started planning this wedding and 2020 I believe, like late 2020. And we got engaged I think around that time lol maybe we gotta get to 2021 I have no idea. Actually, I do know it was 2021 We gotta get we have been together for five and a half years now. We started wearing rings, about three and a half years ago. I like to feel, I wanted to feel maximum committed. It really came about I think we talked about this in one of our duet episodes that we have together. But we started wearing rings out of a kind of a silly, jokey, fun, playful experiment. So we loved each other. We’d said I love you said I love you very quickly. We were very sure of each other very quickly. And then one day I was living in Queens he was living in Manhattan was basically a long distance relationship. He was over at my house. And we were going to target that was like an outing and target from Queens is like so far away. We do not have a car we were gonna go on this long ass trip to target because it’s one of my favorite places. My grandmother had passed and I had her engagement ring. So I had this beautiful diamond ring. And Chris had this ring from somewhere in his life that he had. He was like, should we wear rings today to target and pretend that we’re married, and I was like, yes, let’s do that. Then we like wore rings and had the best time like joking around and nobody cared. Nobody gave a shit. We tell told our like checkout person like haha, my husband, my wife, it was hilarious and nobody cared and we had the best time. And after that we both really wanted to feel maximum committed, we wanted the sort of the outside to match the inside of our choice to be with each other. And so, three half years ago, we started both wearing rings on our left ring fingers. And that felt really good and authentic to us. So we have been wearing rings for a long time planning this wedding for a long time. We originally were going to get married in 2022. But for a couple different reasons that didn’t work out. And so then it was like back to the drawing board and back to planning and, and so it really feels like honestly kind of like a miracle that this season has become. And it is very fun to be doing this. It is also very complex to be doing a wedding, it’s like a big thing. We also along the way have been very conscious to create our own rituals and meaning and our own like what we want out of this and what Chris and I like Chris, and my desires and expectations have been similar along the way have been different along the way in terms of the wedding and what we want and what we don’t want. And so that’s just been like an exercise in communication in partnering with each other in I’m sure I’ll have him on the podcast to talk about it at some point. But I did poll my Instagram audience, y’all my community. If y’all had any questions about the wedding a long time ago, like months ago now. And I wanted to rapid fire answer some of them. Let me go back and say My intention with sharing about this is to let you in on what’s happening in my life right now. It is not to my intention is not to create any sort of opportunity for you to compare or think that I think that a wedding makes one further along. That’s a bullshit patriarchal narrative. I really wanted to let you in on this part of my life and also honestly, like, held back on talking about it a lot because of the fear and of the knowledge that my clients and my community, there’s this like, desire for a relationship for the right relationship to feel joyful as fuck in your love lives. And there’s also the desire for the right partnership. And it’s not here yet. And the space between those things can be so arduous. And I know that you celebrate your married and coupled friends like pretty often and that Society offers opportunities to celebrate them really often. So if anything, I hope that this talking about my celebration gets you curious about what could your celebration before yourself to mark a significant moment in your life or to celebrate something significant in your life? So I wanted to put that out there. So let me rapid fire answer some of these questions. What are we doing differently, we are doing a couple big things differently. We are sleeping together before the wedding in the same hotel room baby it is my joy to be able to stay at a really beautiful luxury hotel that is not something that I’m very used to. And so I hope that on the morning of the wedding will like wake up luxuriously. The weddings in the evening, I hope that we’ll just like relax and maybe even get a massage at the hotel and then start getting ready. We will greet our guests with a cocktail the minute they show up. So we’re starting with a cocktail party I didn’t want to be hidden at any point in the day I wanted to be out mingling with my people, my favorite human beings that is different. Our ceremony is in the round. I really it was important to me to be in the round because I wanted to be surrounded by our closest people. Another thing that we’re doing differently during the ceremony or like before it is that Chris and I will walk in towards each other together so we’re not together like my parents will walk me in his mom will walk him in at the same time. So we’re coming like together to the center of the circle together that felt really meaningful. Our ceremony is like super short, not religious, officiated by our dear dear friend. And then when the ceremony is over, we’ll go like into dinner that’s kind of, you know, like normal, whatever. And then we’re like we have surprises throughout the night. So I don’t want to like I know some people who are coming to the wedding or listening to this podcast, so don’t want to ruin any surprises. Suffice it to say they are unconventional and super fun. And we’re keeping some of the structure of like a, you know, conventional thing without the conventional stuff that doesn’t feel good. it, what’s the most main character energy thing we’re doing? I think for me, my most main character energy thing that I am going to do on the week of the wedding is allow myself to be in pleasure and to receive love allowing myself to like take up space in that week without without panic or, I mean maybe there’ll be panic feelings, I’m gonna hopefully allow them and like move through them. I’m going to do so imperfectly. I think the most main character and energy thing is just like embodying my body and like owning my space and being really fucking delighted. Right? I also will say that like weddings bring up a lot of body thoughts and body feelings and old stuff and like, feeling like oh my god, people are gonna be looking at me and what what does my body like? Like like all I just want to if you are struggling with body stuff around being seen and being visible, like I join you, it is something that I work through on a daily basis. Honestly, with my therapist, I’ve been reading the body liberation project by my friend, Chrissy King, it’s been changing my life. It’s so good, and I highly recommend it to you. Another thing is that my name will stay the same. That was really important to me that I say, you know, remain Lily Womble, the other people make other choices. And that’s beautiful for them. For me, I wanted to keep my name more questions from the Instagram poll land, what parts of the planning are bringing you joy, I love being supported. So we have the privilege of being supported by a coordinator, a lot of other vendors who feel super aligned and talented and we’re so pumped to have them as a part of our day. So like being supported, and that’s why I love like, I’ve really been focusing this year on like, allowing support on my loved ones wanting to support and coming into support and flying in from around the country to support and love on us and the help that we’ve been able to invest in to support us and to support our vision that’s been like really joyful to receive. It’s also been joyful to like figure out what to wear and figure it out with Chris and Chris and I like dreaming up the playlist together and like we’re doing a string quartet at the top of the like during during the cocktail party and during the ceremony and like we’re having like bridgerton pop music on the string quartet which is going to be so fun. And then a DJ who is fabulous and we like created a playlist that and this guides me into next question let’s talk playlist what’s the energy it is high energy super vivacious, authentic to us. It is like basically moments in our lives and in our journey together are in this playlist like that. For me, there’s a lot of like, I don’t know Britney and like Celine Dion and Taylor Swift and Beyonce, Beyonce and Taylor Swift Chris and all of those artists Chris loves to we have very similar tastes in music. And Chris has added things from his you know, playlist of his life. Somebody else said I want to know everything. Well, this is I don’t know, this is like a lot I’m so grateful to be sharing with you how many people are coming we have 58 people coming maybe 57 Very small, firm, you know, small comparatively to the weddings I’ve been to I’m super pumped about that. How did you split assign wedding planning tasks, I’m very type A and I have planned many events in my day. So I sort of took lead on project planning before our coordinator came on and then Chris and I made all of the like vendor decisions together who to hire who to work with we took all of the calls together with to interview those vendors feels like forever ago, two and a half two years ago ish. And then when it came to like doing stuff I put like all of the tasks up on a whiteboard that we have, and I organize them by month I enjoy the hell out of this sort of type A notice and we split up the tasks from there based on like what sticky notes needed to be done when and by whom. So that was that I am so grateful for this reading experience it’s happening it’s pretty wild I’m just working to receive it and working to create like you know whenever there’s any flurry of gotta do this got to do that I’m very type a very like love to check things off the list. I’m really trying to work to create calm and in body Chris is incredible at supporting me through that what I’ve really just been coming, honing in on working on consistently is like, trusting myself to make all of the decisions that are necessary, including the one to partner with this incredible human right like, I trust myself and As you know, someone that seen a lot of relationships not work in my life, including my parents, unfortunately, I knew at a young age that marriage was like a big decision. And that it was one, it could be one rooted in agency. I also am very firm and like, a relationship does not define one success. And so this is a fun bonus that we get to live and do life together. And I trust myself in all of the ways, and I trust Chris in all the ways and I’m excited for this party to be like a memory and an expression of the commitment and the choice that we’re making to do this life together side by side. I’m really grateful, and I glad to be sharing with you, I don’t know, it’s exciting. I mean, the other part of it is like very transparently, also writing a book at the same time, it’s sort of like how much life can one live at once it’s a it’s like a fire hose a little bit of like life. And that has been interesting to navigate as well, super vulnerable, super different tasks that are like a skill set that I am not used to I’ve never written a book before. And so that book will be turned in very soon. And the team helping me with that is incredible. And I can’t wait to share more about that. So it’s just this really intense, both end that is joyful, and I consistently have to, you know, my brain is very used to dressers and tragedy and like trying to protect myself from the hard things. And so it’s consistent mindset work to like, receive this allow this somebody on Instagram DM to me and was like, I know that life isn’t perfect. And from the outside, you’re living this really cool moment and you’re getting married and you’re you’re writing a book, all these things, and I thanked her, and I was reminded that like, oh yeah, other people do see this happening. And I’m here to tell you like I remain very human with a very human brain. amidst everything. Not everything goes perfectly not everything goes according to plan. I still struggle with anxiety, I still am working through that I still get therapy and support and it is everything everywhere all at once to use the iconic film title. And I’m grateful to be sharing this life season with you in this moment. I’m grateful that you’re a part of this community. I’m grateful that you’re sharing in this year. And what I want you to take away like I said earlier in the episode is like where and what do you want to celebrate? What do you have right now that is going well that you can brag on right now. Either text a friend to brag on yourself or DM me on Instagram at date brazen and to brag on yourself. And if you don’t have a community who celebrates your wins because a lot of people’s communities don’t get the wins outside of the conventional narrative of you know, baby, family, marriage, whatever. We know that that’s like, definitely not the only thing to celebrate it is a fun bonus. You have so much going on. I’m so I am celebrating you over here in Brooklyn. I don’t even know what’s going on in your life. I know there’s amazing stuff. So if anything I want you to take away from this episode. What do I want to celebrate about myself about my journey about where I am right now? Who can you invite into celebrate you and know that I’m just holding you in my thoughts in this in this time. I also am going to be releasing some replay episodes to really remind you of some work that we have done in the podcast feed just to like deepen those lessons and learnings because I will be writing a lot so I’ll be we’ll be throwing in some replays so that you can deepen those learnings remind yourself of those lessons, and I will be writing so cool both and so excited to support you continually throughout this year. It’s gonna be a big fucking year 2024 It’s gonna be a big fucking year. I can’t wait. There’s so much cool stuff happening that I can’t talk about my Okay, thank you for being here. Thank you for being dear, gorgeous listeners. And I will talk to you very very soon.