Months–and sometimes years–go into creating the perfect wedding day. You’ll see bridal magazines bursting with ideas to make your day perfect. You’ve pored over every small detail to make sure it’s exactly the right touch for your special day. Your mother invested in bulk tissues just to make sure she wouldn’t lose a second of the action to misty eyes. You’ll hear family members and wedding planners alike refer to your wedding as your “Big Day,” your “Dream Come True,” and sometimes even “The Most Important Day of Your Life.” Whew, that’s a lot of pressure!

Remember: Mistakes Will Happen

Everyone hopes for a perfect wedding day. But let’s face it: when was the last time you had a whole day that was really, truly, literally perfect? Even on the best days, there’s always some small thing that doesn’t go according to plan. From the small mistakes (such as buying the wrong color envelopes) to the really big dilemmas (like your venue burning down the day before your wedding), wedding days aren’t exempt from the “nothing’s perfect” rule just because they happen to be marked on your calendar in bright red. The only difference is: unlike every other day of the year, we expect the wedding day to be perfect.

Setting up unrealistically high wedding expectations is a surefire way to get your hopes dashed. We’ve all seen the meltdowns of reality-TV bridezillas when their stylists run out of their favorite type of eyeliner or they break a nail right before the ceremony. No one sets out to be a bridezilla.. But the best way to make sure you don’t become one is to keep your expectations realistic. After all, your wedding is still going to be wonderful even if a few things go wrong. Do you want to be so upset about the bad parts you end up missing the good parts?

Avoid a Post-wedding Letdown

Even though a wedding is a happy occasion that marks the start of married life, building up so much anticipation for a single day can lead to post-wedding blues when it’s all over. After months of planning to culminate in a “happily ever after” honeymoon, coming back to real life can seem, well, uneventful. You might even end up starting married life in a bit of an emotional slump–and who wants that? The more energy and effort you put into making sure your once-in-a-lifetime day is perfect, the more you put yourself at risk of crashing hard on the other side.

Decorate More Than Just the “Front Door”

The bottom line is this: your wedding isn’t just about making one day perfect. Concentrating all of your efforts on planning for one “big day” is like spending your entire home-decorating budget on the front door of your house. What happens when you walk through that door? It’s important to leave yourself the energy you’ll need to launch into married life successfully.

Instead of focusing on the impossible task of making one day perfect, there is a better way to spend your energy: start thinking now about how you’ll decorate the “rest of the house.” Instead of stressing because the wedding caterer won’t give you a discount on 200 servings of crème brûlée, for example, pick another menu item and start planning your first date night at your favorite French restaurant.

No matter where you run into problems planning your wedding, there’s almost always a way to turn around the experience into something positive for married life. If you can’t hold your ceremony in a rose garden as you’ve always dreamed, start planning the miniature roses you’ll grow on your windowsill instead. If your sister is too sick to attend your wedding, start planning your first vacation as a married couple to visit her.

Every now and then, you’ll run into a problem that really, truly can only pertain to a wedding day. Let’s say you ordered a set of custom paper napkins and they arrived with the wrong monogram just days before your wedding. Well, there’s not much you can do about that (other than putting a nice set of linen napkins on your registry–you’ll get more use out of them, anyway!). But if you’re having such a hard time coming up with a way to relate your problem to your post-wedding life, it’s actually a good sign. It means that it’s really not a big deal. Your wedding day will come and go, almost certainly as a success, and 10 years from now you won’t even remember what went wrong.

So as you plan for your wedding in the coming months, keep an eye on the bigger picture. When something goes wrong, don’t sweat it; it’s just one day out of many happy days your marriage will hopefully contain. Every time the sun rises on your married life, you’ll have a fresh chance at making a perfect day. Your wedding day should be as perfect as you can make it, of course–but it’s only the first day of the rest of your life.