Dream weavers

Romantic, traditional or simply bizarre: Dena Rashed reviews her options talking to the men and women behind some of Cairo's most remarkable weddings

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Choosing a partner for life is one of the hardest decisions you can make. That's commonly accepted wisdom -- and it's true. Except that, it turns out, it's not half as hard as deciding exactly how to tie the knot in style. Don't think the difficulty is over once you've found Mr (or to be Mrs) Right -- it's only just beginning.

For women especially, planning for The Day will often turn into the most nerve-racking, not to mention time- consuming and expensive pursuit they've been through since the day they were born.

The perfect dress, the species and arrangement of flowers, the nature, structure and decorative scheme of the setting: most young women will have fantasised it all down to the last detail, often long before they've even met a viable match.

But pulling figments of imagination into a coherent memorable evening is no mean feat; and just as many of us will find it impossibly forbidding. Enter the wedding planners -- themselves by now an essential part of any wedding worth marking your calendar with. Once a role played by mothers, sisters and cousins -- they would put together a menu, stitch a dress, select a bouquet -- the wedding planner (immortalised or rather conceived in Jennifer Lopez's The Wedding Planner ) is today a profession unto itself, as prestigious as it is lucrative. Young, slick, with earphones dangling down the neck and pen and paper in hand, they buzz about the shortly-to-blossom bud, utilising greater and greater amounts of cool to lead her, painlessly, through this life-defining episode.

"That's what we're here for -- to spare the couple all the planning details they would otherwise consider for themselves." Thus one up-and coming drone, Walid El- Telbany, who started out as an "event planner", soon to turn into a widely sought after expert in the Lopez arena. "They simply come to us with their ideas, and we contact the specialists and do all the organising. We can arrange anything and everything for a couple," he breathes, "from the dress and suit to the honeymoon package..."

El-Telbany is candid: what was a box-office flop turned, for him, into the incentive for a shift in career path. "It started with the marriage of many of my friends," he recounts. "I noticed how things repeatedly failed to go very smoothly. And it was often because the couple had to arrange for different aspects of the event with different people. What was lacking," he declaims, "was a single figure to coordinate efforts, a kind of wedding leader to take charge of the operation as a whole, in such a way as to spare the couple having to communicate with anyone else." A gap he thought he could fill.

Nor can this line of thinking be trivialised: one of the greatest problems a bride will experience prior to her wedding is the stress building up to it, and an invaluable part of the contribution a wedding planner makes is relieving that stress.

"While preparing for my wedding," Omnia El-Shaafey testifies, "I was under such stress I really wished someone would spare me the details." El-Shaafey's marriage plans eventually floundered, but the thought remained. "Even after my wedding was cancelled, I remembered how great it would have been had someone been there to take charge," she says, "a planner."

Partly as a result, she has started her own business as a wedding planner eight months ago. Together with her colleague Ahmed Mazen, she has since organised 17 weddings. "We have been able to divide weddings between us. Sometimes Mazen will handle the bridegroom's side, leaving the bride to me; this is particularly helpful when tension begins to grow between the two families."

Much of the job concerns diplomacy and innate talent, El-Shaafey emphasised. "It's also about creativity, diversity and communication skills. You either have the skills," she opined, "or you don't. Personally we don't like to treat our brides as official clients. We like to have as intimately friendly relations with them as possible."

But as the planning business grows, so does competition. According to El-Telbany three qualities set the "real" planners apart from amateurs on the one hand and conventional hotel impresarios on the other: "quality, cost and ideas". Speaking of which, in the third department, theme weddings seem to be gaining in popularity.

"One bride had this fascination with butterflies," El- Telbany illustrates his point, "and, yes, we managed to organise a butterfly-themed wedding for her. There were butterflies everywhere, even on the napkins."

Making their entry aboard a barque, in broad daylight, or landing onto the wedding spot in a balloon: these are but two examples of the kind of spectacle that the existence of wedding planners helps bring into being for couples eager to have a unique wedding. Without planners, in many cases, they'd be impossible.

In the early stages of the rise of wedding planning, planners would take a commission for their services -- a time- consuming, unreliable method. Today they request that you settle on a budget -- a simple figure for them to work with -- then make a detailed offer with their own prices for each item on the list: make-up and hairdressing, invitation cards, entertainment, flowers, photography and video, hotel bookings and honeymoon reservations...

One bridegroom's sister who organised her brother's wedding, Shahenaz Badr, prefers the latter option. First she tried treading the conventional path, she says, but quickly came to the conclusion that, while the cost of package weddings offered by hotels may sound more reasonable than what a wedding planner's offer tends to come to, the ultimate outcome is rarely as adequate or pleasing. "Three weeks before the day," she recalls, "we started looking for a wedding planner, under terrible pressure -- but in the end the wedding turned out exactly as we had envisaged it."

For some brides going the hard -- independent -- way, relying solely on their own resourcefulness is not as bad as it sounds. "A few years ago," Doaa Felfela, who was married two years ago, recalls, "there were only one or two well-known wedding planning firms and both demanded extremely high fees, so I decided I would do it myself."

Stress and the shadow of madness notwithstanding, she remembers the preparations primarily as a fun experience. "I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, so I wanted to find out about everything and do it my own way. In retrospect it's hard to remember exactly how stressed and panicky I was, what sticks in the mind is the fun, the delight of anticipating it and feeling it's all your own..."

But even with a wedding planner on board, some brides like to leave a few things to themselves or their mothers. "Although I was really comfortable with the wedding planner I had for my engagement, in the end I left the catering and some other details to my mother," Mahi Nagui, a young bride-to-be, explains affectionately, "because I knew she'd enjoy doing these things for me so I really wanted her to."

Such gestures of love notwithstanding, it is family involvement that tends to test the planner the most, demanding both diplomacy and patience. "Usually the couple agree and make our lives easy," El-Telbany testifies, "it's the mothers who sometimes give us a hard time; because they have different tastes, they have their own vision for their children's weddings and they want to see it happen at all costs."

Whatever you decide, in the end, remember that no matter how big or small you want your wedding to be -- on the beach, in a ballroom, in a giant simulated tropical forest -- there are people who can help you have exactly that, at a price.

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