If you’re thinking about getting married, Gwen Wilson can tell you exactly how to prepare. After all, it is her job.

“I’m somewhere between listening and advising the brides,” Wilson said. “Making sure they know what to expect of the vendors.”

As the founder and owner of Nuptiae, The Wedding & Event Planners, Wilson works with brides from their engagement through the wedding. Her tasks include arranging for floral vendors, bakers, church secretaries, photographers, banquet halls, transportation and other elements of a wedding.

“Some brides want to be really involved and others may want to be the exact opposite,” Wilson said. She has taken her involvement in the art of matrimony up one step by surveying local brides.

“I thought it would be really interesting to see over time how trends change,” Wilson said.

Her results represent the answers of 119 women in Champaign County who are engaged to be married and are actively planning their weddings. Wilson said she spends about 150 hours on average planning just one wedding, so this survey helped to broaden her understanding of today’s brides.

The survey addressed issues such as budgets, payment, dresses, engagement time, month of the wedding, last names changes, open bars and other areas. The most popular month for a wedding was, not surprising to Wilson, June, with 19.6 percent of weddings occurring during that month. March and January tied with the lowest number of weddings with 0.9 percent of respondents marrying during this time of the year.

Wilson was surprised to find that many brides plan their weddings far in advance and that 100 percent of the respondents opted to buy a new gown instead of using their mothers’ – many of whom were married in the 1970s when styles varied greatly from today’s looks.

“The style then was way different, and I would like to express my own personality with my own dress,” said Abbey Malcom, a junior in communications. She follows the trend, saying that if she were to marry, a new dress would be a must.

Kal Alston, director of Gender and Women’s Studies, took a look at the results to give her thoughts on the trends the survey revealed.

“Of the friends I went to college with, almost none took their husband’s last names,” Alston said. 88.2 percent of the respondents chose to take the groom’s name, while 5.9 percent chose to keep their own and another 5.9 percent will hyphenate the two. Alston said many of her friends married at ages “more like 33” and had professional careers to tend to.

“Depending on my career I would consider at least hyphenating it because I feel now in the business world, women should have their own identity,” Malcom said.

Another swing in the traditional wedding has been in the area of cost. The Nuptiae results showed that 51.6 percent of brides polled were paying for their wedding with help from both sets of parents and the groom. Only 28.6 percent of the respondents had the traditional parents of the bride paying for the whole event.

“Probably one of the biggest changes is that there’s a lot of cost sharing,” Alston said. “The idea that the bride’s family is providing sort of a dowry – this idea is probably on the down.”

While Wilson tends to work closely with the bride or a team of the bride and her mother, she has had one groom show some interest in helping create his own wedding.

“In the last two weeks I had a groom contact me about my services and to set up an appointment. Now, he’s going to be a good husband.”