How not to enjoy wedding planning.

Well.  In case you don't know me in person {which means, almost all of you}, you might not know that I'm a wee bit particular.  Okay okay...I'm totally nit picky and OCD about everything.  Everything.  It all has to be just so, and if it's not, I kind of get a bit...let's say "overwrought".  But really, I don't think expecting the absolute best for {one of} the most important day{s} of my life is too much to ask.  Or is it?

Wedding planning has sucked.
Big time.

Some stuff has been awesome and simple.  For instance, my photographer is one of the most amazing people I've ever even met.  The catering manager?  Totally cool.

Dealing with some of the other vendors/prospective vendors has been a nightmare.  To even attempt to book our venue, it took ten phone calls and I never even got a response from the venue itself, only the caterer that works with the venue.  And on top of that, we weren't told for several months after booking that we needed to sign a contract with the venue.  We were under the impression that the contract signed with the caterer covered everything.  The first florist we saw?  Four months to get a quote.  {obviously we decided on a different florist}

Against my better judgement, I ended up buying my dress from David's Bridal.  I was dead set against using them at all, based on poor customer service in the past {learned from partaking in several other weddings for family and friends}, but I found a Vera Wang dress I fell in love with, and my consultant was an absolute dream to work with.  Unfortunately, when picking our bridesmaid dresses she was nowhere to be found.  When my sister picked up her dress, she discovered a huge snag all down the front, and was told that it wasn't DB's problem {though luckily, the manager did finally take care of it!}

The latest straw that has me in a funk?  The cake tasting.
I can't entirely explain how, but it let me down big time.  To start with, the weather was awful, so I was already stressed out and halfway to miserable by the end of the drive there.  Upon arrival, things were disappointing right off the bat.  The bakery seemed as though they weren't prepared for us at all, though I scheduled the meeting back in December.  The baker barely explained what we were trying {and there was very little assortment of things to try}, and left the room for extended periods of time.  And she only had poor quality printouts of cakes they'd done in the past, as apparently all of their booklets were off at a bridal show.  Now, I knew what kind of cake I had in mind, but what if I hadn't?  To top it off, at the end of the "consult", she started to discuss pricing before I reminded her that this cake was already a part of our catering package.  But what if it wasn't?  Was she really expecting us to order our cake through a bakery that didn't seem to put in that much effort to win our business?  Especially as this bakery is a very well known and highly regarded bakery locally, I was most definitely expecting more.  But maybe my expectations were too high.


Have any of you run into these problems planning your own wedding?  How did you keep wedding stress at bay??