I tracked every WhatsApp message it took to plan one wedding. The number will annoy you.

247 messages. Six separate WhatsApp groups. Three vendors who created their own splinter group after a miscommunication in the main one. This is what it actually took to plan one mid-size Lagos wedding, tracked message by message.

The breakdown: 61 messages were guest count changes. 38 were "following up on the quote." 22 were some version of "can you resend that document." Only a small fraction were actual creative decisions about the event itself.

The most telling stat: the caterer had the wrong final headcount as late as four days before the event, despite being told the correct number three separate times in three different chats.

None of this is a knock on the people involved — it's a knock on the tool. WhatsApp is built for conversation, not for tracking who agreed to what. That mismatch is where most event chaos actually comes from.