Posts Tagged ‘Small Weddings’

Nov 2011

Ask Team Practical: Small Weddings, the Other Side of the Coin

I had a very close friend and former-roommate get reunited with an ex-boyfriend, engaged to the boyfriend, and married to the boyfriend in the span of seven months. I fully expected to be on board on The Big Day, to support my friend in entering a new world, to embarrass her conservative values with a penis-themed bachelorette party, to watch her exchange vows and to generally be the friend I have always been. But I wasn't invited, and neither were lots of friends who would have loved to attend (for totally legitimate reasons, and I don't feel especially singled out or anything unfair—it was simply their choice to have a very small event on a very short timeline in another state).

But still! It really stings that after all we went through together as friends over this boy, I didn't get to be there for the conclusion of their dating life. It feels like someone ripped the climax out of a really good book and left the entirely unsatisfying last page.

How do I make up for this sense of loss of not getting to participate? Do I just put on my big girl panties and act like it's all okay? Do I confront her about it and make her feel bad for making me feel bad? Do I simply remember this feeling when it's finally my turn and invite everyone I ever met? I want to be genuinely and un-distractedly happy for her when I see my old friend, the new Mrs.

~Suddenly A Downer; Bummer Friend Forgotten

SAD BFF, let's look at this from a different angle, just for fun. You with me? Of course you're with me:

Dear APW,

I recently reconnected with my ex-boyfriend and found out that we'd both changed in wild and wonderful ways. The sparks flew, as did our clothes, until we realized that we couldn't do without each other. In a whirlwind fashion (that is so not like conservative me!!) we reunited, got engaged and got married all within a span of seven months. I know it didn't appeal to a lot of people, especially my friends, but we really didn't want to waste any more time that we'd lost while being broken up. We decided to have a very small wedding in my husband's hometown for a variety of reasons; some of which were due to budget constraints, the location and the very short timeline we decided on.

We were thrilled to pieces with our wedding, but apparently some of our friends were not. We did not single anyone out and tried to be as fair as possible about the guest list, but I feel that some of them don't understand why they were not invited. I know feelings were hurt, but it wasn't that we tried to exclude anyone; our small wedding ended up being the best thing for us. How do I make them understand that our friendship isn't contingent on the invitation to our wedding and that I still adore them as much as I ever did?

~Suddenly Apparently a Downer; Bad Feeling Friend

Original SAD BFF, do you see what I'm getting at? I do feel really badly for you; it is very disappointing to not be included in a close friend's wedding, but it's a disappointment you're going to have to weather. If you confronted your friend about it, what answer could she possibly give you that would make you feel okay? (Besides, you shouldn't ever make someone feel bad if they made you feel bad. The moral high ground has a lovely view...) Your hurt is understandable, but cluing her into it won't elicit anything further than an apology, followed by justifications on why they had the wedding they did and then a long uncomfortable evening.

There's also the option that something way beyond her control kept her from inviting the people she wanted to and she already feels pretty bad about it. There are plenty of us who wish we had a do-over with certain aspects of our wedding and I bet 90% of us would include the guest list in that list. It's a tough thing, planning a wedding, and the last thing you need to hear as a newlywed is how you did it wrong.

And, um, point of order—who says the story is over?!? Continue reading Ask Team Practical: Small Weddings, the Other Side of the Coin

Posted in: Ask Team Practical | 108 Comments »

Nov 2011

Wedding Graduates: Brittany & Nick Elope (Sort of)

We started this week with Manya's story about how crazy waiting to get engaged can make you and how you can be redeemed with your actions. So it only seemed right to follow that up with Brittany & Nick's story about how planning a wedding was making them crazy... and how they chose to let go of it all, and have a teeny tiny wedding where they followed their hearts and were surrounded by love.

Planning a wedding is like eating pancakes. Initially you’re super stoked—it’s gonna be so great, I love pancakes! There’ll be all these adornments—pecans and bananas and syrup and butter. Glorious! But a few pancakes in you’re sick and f’ing tired of pancakes… but you’ve already committed. So you feel like you have to finish the pancakes you’ve already started, and if you do, by the end you’re like EFF—I never liked pancakes in the first place! I’m never eating pancakes again! I don’t want to see another pancake recipe as long as I live. I might vomit. But what happens if you scrap the pancakes halfway in and decide to have an omelet instead?

Before I knew it, I was knee deep in pancake batter and there was no eating my way out. Nick and I, in a failed attempt to appease the masses, staked our claim on a moderately sized and well-antiqued bed and breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We hired string musicians, debated hors d’oeuvres, researched flowers, types of paper and invitations (embossed or just plain print? Will I be judged for cutting that God-Forsaken corner?), and all sorts of other sh*t that neither of us had ever cared about before. We were swept away in a monsoon of half-a*sed concessions and sacrifices we swore we’d never make.

And then one lovely December afternoon, a request for a deposit came. Our venue wanted their cash to reserve the date, as it was merely five months away. It was timely, yet for some guttural reason unexpected. And with that brief three-lined email, my wedding-world-façade came crashing down. It was met with panic and hesitation. This would be the commitment to a wedding event that we didn’t want. I had been so sure, so committed to this pancake extravaganza we were cooking up. When in reality, we were egg people all along.

So I called my family. I told them we were eloping but they were most certainly invited. It would be in Savannah, Georgia over my Spring Break. Why Savannah? Why not. Why Spring Break? Because what else do you do Spring Break your senior year of college? And Nick did the same. They applauded our honesty and stood by our decision.

As for the rest of our wedding planning—it was cake (ha!). It consisted of picking flower colors, cake flavors, type of champagne and time of ceremony—all left up to my most wonderful partner Nick. There was one thing from the original plans we didn’t scrap—the photographers. We needed someone who would capture the day as we experienced it, and seeing as there would be few witnesses, this became even more of a priority. And we were so not disappointed by that decision! The photographers were two lovely ladies we found on APW who were equally as excited about the prospect of our elopement and were quickly onboard with the new plan.

Some people might have an aversion to a pre-packaged elopement, but it fit us just right. We didn’t want a courthouse elopement, but a full-fledged wedding wasn’t our style either. This allowed us to find our place in the wedding-spectrum that felt to be the most candid, unadulterated representation of who we are and what our unity represents. Oh, and when we told people we were eloping and our closest family would be there, the puzzled looks were promptly followed with, "Isn’t the point of eloping to have no one know? It isn’t an elopement if people are there and it’s planned!" We called it an elopement because that was the name of the package. We could have called it a small wedding, or an intimate commitment ceremony or a union gala. It wouldn’t have made a difference. All that mattered was Nick and I were there, it was exactly what we wanted, our family was joyous and we were surrounded by love on the most important, defining day of our lives. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Brittany & Nick Elope (Sort of)

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 47 Comments »

Oct 2011

1980 Vintage Wedding: Dan & Reiko

Today's vintage wedding (vintage weddings, by the way, are among my favorite things) is from the parents of Elissa of Elissa R. Photo in Austin, TX (APW Sponsor). The fact that Elissa is the spitting image of, well, both of her parents, only makes this a happier read for me. Dan and Reiko's wedding has all the hallmarks of current international weddings (some things change, other things never do), with multiple ceremonies stretched out over time. But it also speaks of a time when doing it simply was a little easier, and it points to what's really important—the marriage.

Reiko and I met in suburban Minneapolis in the Fall of 1971, about two months after she arrived in the United States from her native Japan as a Rotary Exchange Student. During this time, we met regularly and experienced High School together. We couldn't call it dating because she was on an exchange program and the sponsor forbade it, but together we shivered through ski-jump meets, downhill skiing, and other outdoor winter activities.

I made my first trip to Japan in 1973. At 19-years-old, looking over the waters of Lake Chuzenjitoward Nantai-yama, we talked about our future together. To my proposal, she did not say yes. But most importantly, she did not say no. For seven years, we courted. I made several trips to Japan; Reiko made several trips here. We exchanged a few dozen letters (it took almost a week for even an airmail letter to arrive). In the end, both Reiko and her family agreed that we could marry, so she bought a one-way ticket on Pan Am's nonstop flight from Tokyo to New York where I was living and working at the time.

I met Reiko at JFK Customs and we drove into the city to my very tiny apartment in a huge sky-scraper across the street from a large hospital. Neither of us was hungry. She was jet lagged; I was tired. We had a simple but meaningful talk over a cup of very bad instant coffee. We now celebrate that date (it is engraved in our rings) as the day we began our lives together and forever.

Some weeks after our commitment to each other, we asked my mother's uncle to meet us at the New York County (Manhattan) Marriage Bureau where we were legally married by a judge. A passer-by in one of the corridors outside the Judge's office used my 6x6 camera to make a photo record of us as we looked that day since photos weren't allowed in Chamber. With the time-clocked and signed marriage license safely stored in an envelope, my great-uncle took the train home to New Jersey and we took a subway up-town. Continue reading 1980 Vintage Wedding: Dan & Reiko

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Oct 2011

Wedding Graduates: Sarah & Marcus

Today's Wedding Graduate post is especially moving because it's a Wedding Graduate post and a Wedding Graduate Returns post all in one. We've been in the process of cleaning out our Wedding Graduate archives (so much brilliant stuff in there), and following up with people on what has happened since they wrote their posts. Sarah's post talks about all the work they did to create a green wedding, and about how in the end, what really deeply mattered were the people there loving them. In the past year, their lives have changed enormously (more at the end of the post!), and it's that tremendous sense of love celebrated on their wedding day that acts as an anchor for what came next.

My husband (gah!) and I live in New Zealand. For those who aren’t quite sure where that is—and that is fine, there aren’t that many of us down here—it is south east of Australia in the South Pacific Ocean. We got married on the 3rd of April on a remote beach called Wai iti in Taranaki. Taranaki is where I grew up and it's where all my family lives, too. It has this great wild coast of beaches with high cliffs and slapping seas. It is beautiful there, and it's where we wanted to get married from the start.

Our wedding was a truly magical weekend at the beach, filled with love, wonderful family and friends, fun and games, and lots and lots of very special moments. When we first started planning, Marcus and I brainstormed together everything we wanted our wedding to be. We stuck our brainstorms on the wall in the office and they framed our approach to the weekend. While admittedly, in the end, we did have smack loads of help and luck, I think focusing from the start on what made sense to us, and doing it, made it the epic occasion that it was.

Right from the beginning, it was paramount to us that we got married in a sustainable way—both for the environment and for our own wallets. We are really into being low impact in our lives, and it was important that our wedding day reflected that. It was quite the challenge, but we relished trying to put it all together without using too many of the Earth’s resources.

We bought a great deal second hand. I did get mildly obsessed by charity shops as I hunted for vintage fabrics (to be sewn into tablecloths) and mismatched cut glass vases. We not only went second-hand, but we also up-cycled things that you might otherwise throw out. My friends and I had a ‘Wedding Bee’ at our house to create decorations. Actually it was less a ‘Wedding Bee’ and more a small sweat shop as we furiously made all the place names and then fifty tin can lanterns out of recycled cans. It was a great girls night in.

Though a word of warning: if you are thinking about making tin can lanterns, wine, hammers and nails are not a good mix! Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Sarah & Marcus

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 35 Comments »

Sep 2011

Wedding Graduates: Juliana & Joan

You want a perfect wedding? Well. I think today's wedding might be as close as it gets. It's not perfect in a single traditional sense (no white dress, no big party, no details to speak of, only a few weeks to plan), but it's perfect in the ways that matter. They decided they didn't want to live without each other, they braved multi-national legalities, they planned a wedding in a few weeks that reflected them. Plus, I have a huge soft spot for the ladies who thought they would never marry and then decided they could rock marriage in their own damn way, just like everything else in their lives.

I had never given much thought to a wedding, or even marriage. I pictured myself as one of those mature women who wears red dresses and big floppy hats with large sunglasses and sips wine on sidewalk cafes with a book by her side, with lots of cats waiting at home, or perhaps making time before she meets with her current and not permanent beau. But married? Nope.

Half a year before our wedding, my boyfriend of four years and I decided to split up after I moved to Costa Rica, when we realized that traveling back and forth was completely out of our budget. He had mentioned the option of marrying in a Mr. Darcy way—not the "I ardently love you" proposal but the "against my better judgement" one. I was in shock at first and then shot it down as more trouble than it would be worth and had a dozen different reasons as to why it didn't make sense when neither one of us has ever been "the marrying kind." A couple of months later we discussed the more realistic possibility of him traveling to Costa Rica on a tourist visa, finding work and a way to make his stay more permanent. We even joked about getting married to buy time while they sorted the paperwork out. Two weeks later when his visa application for Costa Rica was rejected, we had to think fast and plan. And then it became crystal clear to me, in a way that it hadn't before, that although I could live without him, I didn't want to. He made my life better, and I wanted him with me. So I proposed and he said yes. It might be good to mention that all these conversations took place on an instant messaging client while we were sitting miles and miles away from each other.

I told my parents, he told his. Due to study and work issues, I could only take a month to go to Colombia, plan the wedding and get married. Getting married in Colombia requires quite a mountain of paperwork and I had to be there in person to hand it in and then get approved to schedule the wedding date. We had to jump through legal hoops and over hurdles, but in the end, I got him some papers so my fiance was able to act in my name, and we had a wedding date. We also had less than six weeks to plan.

Planning this wedding had very little to do with the fluffy bits: decorations, food, flowers, dresses, cards and invitations, engagement photo shoots or gift registries. It had to do with practicality, with simplicity and a lot with boring things like running around the city getting paperwork signed and stamped in different offices and then getting them mailed off. We had long conversations over skype and through chat about our personal goals and expectations of married life and one of the important items had to do with money. We decided two things: we would pay for the wedding ourselves, even if that meant having a really small wedding, and we would not get into debt to have the wedding. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Juliana & Joan

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 25 Comments »

Sep 2011

Wedding Graduates: Maryanne & Harry

Today's wedding is going to restore your faith in the world, I'm just warning you. Maryanne and Harry had their reception at a restaurant that works to feed everyone, whether they can afford to pay or not. It focused on their values instead of stuff. But in true APW fashion, they balanced their values with who they are and still had damn beautiful wedding and a string quartet. This wedding reminds me of what the APW community is all about: being true to yourself and your values; not letting the pretty conflict with the meaningful; standing your ground without making too much a fuss (unless you need to). So without further ado, I bring you Maryanne:

My husband surprised me with his proposal. We were in love, and things were going really well between us, but I didn’t expect that on a Sunday morning last May he’d put an engagement ring on a necklace, put the necklace on my 16-year-old cat, and the two of them proposed to me. I happily said yes.

And after all the happy phone calls to give our families the good news, the question became: when and where shall we have the wedding? We didn’t want anything too fancy or over the top. We knew we didn’t want to break the bank with expenses, and we absolutely knew we didn’t want a lot of material gifts, since we both already had established separate households.

The part that really helped a lot was sitting down at our favorite diner over a grilled cheese (me) and a hamburger (Harry) to decide which elements in the wedding were most important to us.

The list: I wanted to look like a bride; we wanted a string quartet; we wanted to tie in some kind of charity-related theme; we wanted a meaningful and personal ceremony; we wanted to keep it small; we wanted to have it in Denver. We also didn’t want to rush the planning, but we didn’t want to drag out either. So almost six months to the day of getting engaged, we got married on Nov 20, 2010, the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

We ended up choosing to have the wedding reception at the same place as one of our first dates in Denver: the So All May Eat Café (SAME). SAME is an innovative restaurant concept in Denver. It serves healthy meals to people and the customers pay what they think the meal is worth, or, in some cases, what they can, and if they have no money, they can do dishes or help clean up in the kitchen.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Maryanne & Harry

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 27 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘Small Weddings’

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