Preparing for a wedding reminds me of preparing for a Thanksgiving dinner. You spend way too much money buying food and and decorations. You create a list of guests and someone has to get cut out because you don't have enough seats at the table. You always have a great friend who comes in for the event from out of town, and a distant relative shows up without an invite. You can't remember at least one person's name that you should.
Thanksgiving is universally about preparing a big meal, but of course everyone does it a little differently. People have preferences and even pride about what they serve and how they prepare it. There are no laws requiring that you have to serve a turkey, but everyone does, even if it's a pain in the ass to cook and takes far too long to pull off. Because of the mass varieties of food that you and guests try to put on the table, the food is often cold by the time you eat it. The fiasco is totally irrational. Still, you're inclined to host the dinner...
Because of history. Christopher Columbus came to America and sailed the Atlantic on the Santa Maria to eat corn with Pocahontas, or something like that. You don't quite know the history, but you know that it's there.
Because of tradition. You grew up with Thanksgiving meals and so did your parents and their parents' parents.
After it's all over, your house is a mess and all you want to do is sleep. For all it's worth, you feel rewarded enough to have pulled it all off.
That's what wedding planning feels like.