Amber & George

*Amber, Wedding Photographer & George, Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland*

Here is the story of Amber Wilkie’s wedding. When things just stopped working, she ditched everything. They stopped joking about Vegas, and they actually went to Vegas where they got hitched in the Valley of Fire. The interesting thing about this post is that Amber says that she failed at wedding planning, but I read it with my eyes wide, thinking that she’d won at wedding planning in a way few of us are really able to. And while she’s not able to see the Grace in her wedding, as mentioned in her wedding toast, it shines through at every point in this post. Not grace as in graceful, but Grace, the big one: This wedding lives in a state of Grace.

My husband and I got married in Vegas. Like many in the throes of wedding planning, we joked about it whenever we got frustrated. And then our venue canceled on us. Demoralized, we considered places way above our budget. Around this time, I started seriously looking into the “Vegas option” and I found a surprisingly comprehensive set of choices. Sure, there were the Elvis chapels, but also hotel chapels (at various stages of super-cheap to insanely expensive), drive-throughs, strip weddings, helicopter weddings and on and on and on. And somewhere in there, I found out there are companies that will take you out to the desert and give you a wedding that would be beautiful, simple, and—perhaps best for us—cheap.

So that’s what we did. We took our measly $5,000 budget and spent it in Vegas on our immediate families and best friends. Our wedding package (from Scenic Las Vegas Weddings) cost just $1300 and included: limo transportation for 17 people out to the Valley of Fire (about an hour from Vegas), officiant, photographer, bouquet, and boutonniere for the groom. Frankly, it was a little unnerving to send my money off to Vegas ahead of us and not have a single bit of control over whether or not the limos would show, we would actually have someone to marry us, or where we were going!

But in the end, the limos did show, and we all carted out there so my husband and I could get our wed on. When we got back, we bought each one of our 15 guests a big four-course steak dinner with champagne and cocktails. It was the wedding we would have liked to have thrown for everyone we knew, but only for our nearest and dearest, and with the money we were willing to spend on nuptials. Read More…

Relationship Vo-Tech

I‘m not planning a wedding. Not even close.

Two years ago, a few months after my boyfriend Bo and I started dating, we went to a wedding together. It was the kind of wedding where, along with all the bride and groom’s invited guests, their whole church congregation was asked to come, and the reception was just champagne and cake in the church basement. It was beautiful, and we loved how inclusive it was, but we both said that if either of us had a wedding, it wouldn’t be like that. (Good—I thought—even though he says he doesn’t think he’ll ever get married, he’s thinking about it. It’s only a matter of time.)

Then, that fall, another wedding—this time for friends of mine from college. A very beautiful, traditional Jewish wedding—one where the bride and groom couldn’t stop grinning out of sheer happiness. We shared their joy, but again, we said, were either of us to get married, it would be different. (Well, he’s still saying “If I ever have a wedding,” not “If we ever have a wedding,” but if he’s got opinions, that’s got to be good, right?)

Last summer, we went to the wedding of one of Bo’s cousins, and it was flashy, pink, and ostentatious. (There were professional fireworks! it was held in a place called “The Palace”!) We laughed and laughed—it fit his cousin perfectly—but there would never be any fireworks for us!

And by then I had realized that there really weren’t going to be any wedding fireworks for us. Because we’d probably never get married.

We’ve made as strong a commitment to be with one another as two non-married people can make, but my boyfriend grew up in a family led by two people in a toxic, codependent marriage—the kind of family where the kids want their parents to get divorced because then maybe things might eventually be bearable. And that has poisoned marriage for him in a profound way.

This is usually the place in a story like this where people have one of two reactions, both of which grow out of stereotypes of men not caring about relationships and marriage as much as women do. Either (as my mother does) they insist that he’ll “grow out of it eventually,” come to his senses, and propose. Or, (as my sister does) they imply that his not wanting to marry shows that he doesn’t love me, not really, and it will all fall apart. At the beginning of our relationship, I wanted to believe the first one and secretly feared that the second was true.

I don’t doubt that there are men whose lives have followed those storylines. But however simple they may seem from the outside, every one of those situations was unique, with two individuals and their specific relationship. I know my partner, how he loves me, how he appreciates what I do for him, how he balances my faults and I balance his, how he calls me “wonderful, brilliant, and capable,” and I know he could never be shoehorned into those simplistic arcs. Even if he does eventually marry me, or we eventually break up, it doesn’t mean that those were always the only two options.

To be at the point where your relationship stops playing by the rulebook that says “either you get married or you quit” is disorienting. One of the nice things about assuming one will eventually get married is that (as APW illustrates well) weddings can be a crucible that helps forge a couple into a lasting partnership. Looking back on the two years when my sister and her husband were planning their wedding, I can see that the hurdles they jumped together then are the same ones they navigate with such skill now: money, family relationships, learning when to defer to the other and when to stand their ground. Those issues are just as important for Bo and me to get through, but we have to cover them piecemeal, as they come up, and since the stakes of the individual incidents of daily life are often lower than those of a major life event like a wedding, we have to make sure that the hard conversations actually happen rather than letting something slide that we really care about because “Oh well, it’s just this one time…”

That’s certainly doable, though, and it turns out that making sure those conversations happen (instead of just waiting for them to happen when you’re hashing out a guest list or a wedding budget) is a really good way to strengthen a relationship. What’s been unexpectedly painful for me is this: in recognizing I might never get married, I’ve had to grieve for the wedding I’ll never have. No bouquet of peonies. No photos of the day to look at and celebrate for the rest of our lives. No matching silverware unless one of us buys the whole set.

That last one might sound silly. But admitting to myself that it’s okay that no one’s going to give me a set of china may be one of the most important things I ever do. By letting go of the things I’ve always assumed will happen in my life, I can open my eyes to the other possibilities I’d never even seen because I wasn’t looking in that direction. And I’m learning that I can be happy with a partner, when I thought I would only ever really be happy with a husband.

Photo by: Submitted by the author, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license by Flickr user Eddi 07.