Posts Tagged ‘Wedding Diversity’

Aug 2011

Wedding Graduates: Chi-Ling & Than, Part I

Today's wedding graduate post comes from Chi-Ling Wang, long time APW reader and APW sponsor. Her simple, no-nonsense wedding, with a super short engagement, is a joy to behold. It reminds me of why less is often more and how love is enough. And if that wasn't enough, her husband Than joins us this afternoon for his take on the celebration. (Grooms! We love them!) Without further ado, the woman herself:

I was engaged for all of 22 weeks. It took me over a month to come to terms with the fact that I actually wanted a wedding. The two months thereafter were spent securing a venue. The rest was a scrambled dash to the finish line. Herein lies the insights from my experience.

Relax (No, Seriously)

First, stop stressing. The wedding is but one day of your life. It will come and it will go. Stressing about the wedding will not make the day any more wonderful. Unfortunately, I am fairly certain that this is a lesson that one must learn from experience. Three weeks before the wedding, I cracked a tooth. As my dentist cousin walked into the exam room, he put one hand on each of my cheeks, and said, “Stop stressing about the wedding.” Immediately, I thought, “Who tattled?”

More Options Don't Always Help

Planning a wedding was in many ways like managing the remodel of my parents’ home. The plethora of available options did not set me free. Everyone had an opinion and made sure I knew what it was. Worse yet, everything required more time and money than first anticipated. Stress I did. What little time I made to practice yoga, attend kickboxing class, and take evening walks saved my sanity. I wish I had devoted more time to taking care of me.

Plan the Wedding You and Your Partner Want

Ignore unsolicited advice. My esthetician lectured me for a good half an hour about the importance of having a bridal party. As a result, I stopped telling people I was engaged. We followed traditions we liked and made up stuff along the way.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Chi-Ling & Than, Part I

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 42 Comments »

Jul 2011

Wedding Graduates: Candis & Hayley

Today's wedding is awesome, not just because it's a lesbian wedding that took place in a deeply red state (though I love that bit), but because of everything else. It features partners who don't see eye to eye on aesthetics and styles (you don't have to!) and DIY everything, from photography to food, and a dessert (but country club style) reception. Hurrah!

Indulgence was the word of our spectacular, DIY wedding day. Hayley and I aren’t much for themed events (or so I thought), yet our wedding was absolutely centered on indulgence, with a dash of hedonism and political rebellion. We’re a gay couple getting married in a completely crimson state, and we only set out to please ourselves. Ever wanted to see a feminist country club wedding? You should have been there.

Hayley and I come from vastly different places in the world. Geographically, she was born and raised in Louisville, KY, a city with severe bipolar disorder (Midwestern? Southern?), while I grew up in romantic, deeply Old South Georgia. Her fondest memories from childhood include riding her bike to the country club to swim the day away, while mine tend more toward riding my bike down the dirt road to the local pond to fish. She has political anemia: she knows, but she never gets too fired up about much of anything. I, on the other hand, have been known to scare lesser mortals with the vehemence of my social zeal. We may be best friends, but we’ll never be total birds of a feather.

So when the planning began we struggled to conceive of an event that said “Candis and Hayley totally love each other” in a way that was both exciting and authentic. We thought big wedding, small wedding, beach elopement, farm weekend, country club soiree, art gallery chic, etc, etc, ad nauseum. After months of ideas being rejected, we settled on one that had been heavily endorsed by Hayley and that didn’t make me want to vomit. Compromise is the name of the game after all. With Hayley’s family home as venue and garden cocktail party as the style, we were ready to get serious.

Like all couples (maybe more so with two brides) we went through the inevitable arguments over invites, flowers, cakes, dresses, favors, blah, blah, blah. Even the date wasn’t sacrosanct as we changed it twice to accommodate family members. Eventually all things were decided, plans set, dresses bought and gifts arriving in the mail. Wedding planning turned out to be both harder and easier than imagined. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Candis & Hayley

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, Wedding Graduates | 26 Comments »

Jun 2011

Wordless Wedding: Jacquetta & Shaneequa

* Jacquetta & Shaneequa * Photographer Kelly Prizel Photography (APW Sponsor) * Soundtrack for reading, Adele - Make You Feel My Love *

The Info—Dress: J. Crew; Pink Shoes: Chinese Laundry; Suit: Purchased at a hidden gem of a shop in the U Street Corridor of Washington, DC; Ceremony Venue: Woodrow Wilson House garden; Reception: Darlington House; Flowers: Eastern Market farmer's market, arranged by Jacquetta and her hands-on-wedding planner; Planner: LoveBus Events; Photographer: Kelly Prizel Photography

Other cool stuff we should know about: It snowed the morning of our outdoor ceremony. Our recessional song was Kiss by Prince, our wedding planner was nervous the song was a little too risque...

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: An intimate, DIY, family affair that was a little bit hippie a little bit urban and a lot a bit LOVE.

Favorite thing about the wedding: Handmade ceremony programs printed on vintage handkerchiefs (blood sweat and tears, and went like hotcakes as our guests hoarded them). Shaneequa getting to DJ her own reception—setting the tone of the party.

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, Wedding Graduates, Wordless Weddings | 59 Comments »

Jun 2011

Wedding Graduates: Cindy & Julia

Today, after sharing some of her wedding service yesterday, we get wedding grad Cindy (she's the one in the strapless dress)! Cindy hosts APW meet-ups in Chicago, leaves awesome comments, and is in general, awesome. So I was pretty excited for her post from the get-go. But then I started reading it, and she talks about my favorite things: marriage equality (it's Pride month, y'all!), writing words for a ceremony that mean something to you (with examples), and wedding stage managing (you can't do it all! But you should be organized). So needless to say, I'm delighted. Let's do this thing!

Here's how we planned our wedding: one hot summer afternoon, we were chilling on the beach, five blocks from our condo, talking about what we might want our wedding to be like. I can't remember which one of us noticed the pier to our left, but we decided to go check it out. And it was perfect. The pier was V-shaped, which meant we could each have our own aisle, with guests on both sides, and meet in the middle to get married with the Chicago skyline in the background. Hello? This is the stuff that fantasy (lesbian) weddings are made of.

Next, we needed a reception spot, so we kept our eyes peeled as we started to walk home. Half a block from the beach was a restaurant we'd never been to, offering a 3-course prix fixe menu for $18 everyday. So we ate there that night, loved the food and the wine selections, and pretty much decided on the spot that it was the right spot. This is pretty much how all of our planning went – something or someone seemed perfect for us, and it was. From an awesome photographer who specializes in LGBT events/theatre/weddings (um, we were lesbian stage managers getting married, so he was pretty much perfect) to an eco-friendly florist willing to work with our tiny budget to the shocking ease of Chicago Park District permits, everything just fell right into place. And we all lived happily ever after. The End.

(Just kidding.)

While the paragraph above is totally true, not everything was quite so simple. Here are my biggest takeaways:

You will be joyfully overwhelmed and surprised. We knew that our friends and families were excited about us getting married, but we never imagined the magnitude of love we'd feel from them on our wedding day. It was indescribably awesome to have so many people we love in one place celebrating with us.

When I think back to how I felt on the day, the morning seems twice as long as the afternoon and evening combined. We actually had a lot of down time in the morning before we needed to get ready, which you'd think would help get the wedding zen going, but I got antsy and nervous. Once I started actually getting dressed and doing my makeup, that's when I got really calm and just felt READY. After that, the rest of the day flew by in a whirlwind. I was so excited that I sped down the aisle, and then had to awkwardly wait for my bride to meet me in the middle. The ceremony seemed to end almost as soon as it started. Before we knew it, we were cutting the cake and dancing and toasting and falling into (our own bed at home – woot!) exhausted.

On (the lack of) marriage equality. When we became engaged in 2007, our plan was to wait until we could legally marry each other in the state where we lived before throwing a wedding. When the Prop 8 fight started and gay marriage politics heated up across the nation, we dared to hope it might even be pretty soon. But after nearly three years of engagement, we were tired of waiting (and extremely sick of correcting people who assumed our fiances were male) and we really, really just wanted to be married! Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Cindy & Julia

Posted in: LGBTQ Weddings, The Ceremony, Wedding Graduates | 89 Comments »

Jun 2011

Wedding Graduates: Valeria & Stuart, Part 2

And now, Valeria's rich, amazing, wedding graduate story continues... (And can we talk about the dress that she made herself, her amazing ceremony, and her heart bursting love for all of you?)

We had an imperfect wedding. Just like life.

And just like life, our “Two-week wedding celebration” was, at moments, beautiful in that the sky was so blue I was convinced I didn’t need anything for my something blue. Funny, in the imperfection - I spent quite some time doing my hair with some rollers and as soon I got in the golf cart that drove us from the room to the wedding location the wind messed it all up and the fresh flower I had put on it blew away after 10 minutes.

Sad, in that I never thought my dad wouldn't be there and, although I truly believe his spirit was with us, my human mind still would have loved to see his smile when seeing my dress for the first time or to hold his hand while walking down the aisle.

And happy, for having the people we consider our own little circle of love with us that day. And because both of our families were spending two whole weeks together, getting to know each other in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and all while sipping margaritas.

It was a true celebration that joined our families' traditions, the traditions of the place where we married, and other little things other things that represent who we are.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Valeria & Stuart, Part 2

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 32 Comments »

Jun 2011

Wedding Graduates: Valeria & Stuart, Part 1

Today's post is about a million wise things at once: it's about weddings and loss, it's about making your own wedding dress, it's about an international wedding, and a destination wedding. The post comes in two parts, because the story is so rich, so here we go....

Marriage wasn’t in my mind. In fact I kind of had given up on meeting somebody.

You know what comes after that sentence, right? The typical, “two people meet, date for a while, get married in a castle, she wears a beautiful big gown that fairies made and they live happily ever after.”

Not quite. It is more something like, “girl meets boy while working in a bar, thanks to his mum who is a customer and his brother who works with the girl. Boy is English and lives in England. Boy travels for two solid years every 6 weeks to visit the girl, both saving every penny to afford the tickets. The day comes when they both think it's not great to carry on like that. So, girl moves to England. They both know they want to commit seriously, get married, buy a house and a dog, have babies, the lot.”

So. What's next?

After realizing flying any of our families to the other side of the world for the wedding was both impractical and expensive, we settled for the middle (almost literally) and decided to get married in Mexico. We started looking into hotels, prices, etc. and found a resort that we could afford and set a rough date. My partner proposed formally inside the Winchester Cathedral, a beautiful building with lots of meaning for us. I was not bothered about an engagement ring, but was happy when I get a one. So far so good. Until 3 months later, when my mum calls me with the news that you dread the most when you live so far away from your close family: doctors had discovered a brain tumor in my dad. And the world seemed to collapse in front of my eyes.

My dad had surgery. It turns out that it's not just a tumor, but a metastasis from his lungs. Cancer. The bloody big C. He has chemotherapy for the first time.

We braved it as the loving close family we have always been. We lived on the phone. My sister (who by that point had lived in Spain for years with her husband) and I make lots of effort to travel and visit him. Meanwhile the wedding becomes the elephant in the room that nobody dares talk about. Some friends ask when we will book, we don’t know what to say. We make plans, but to me everything seems so distant and impossible that I almost don’t believe it.

Suddenly a ray of light emerges from the clouds. My dad gets better for a few months and we are back on track. Then again, another tumor appears. More chemotherapy, but the doctors are still hopeful and we battle it together again. My dad feels so good that they even go to Spain for a month to see their first grandchild be born. We feel confident, my mum especially has such great faith, that we think life will get better and we go ahead and book the wedding. Thinking the trip will be more than the holiday-plus-wedding-combo we originally thought, and it will turn into the celebration of my dad’s recovery as well. We are six months away from the departure date.

I decide I will, after all, make my wedding dress. (I am a former fashion designer and used to make prom dresses for a living. I also made my sister's wedding dress, to my dad’s pride, in 2006.) Just after the new year I start on my dress, very aware of the little time I have to finish it, but content with the fact I didn't start early in order to focus my energy on a promotion I got at work. I decide not the tell anybody except my close family and partner that I will be making the dress for fear some people will judge me for choosing a career changing opportunity (you know that thing you do in order to get money and that you have to do for most of your adult life) over my dress (you know, that rather overrated piece of clothing that could cost you more than your entire wardrobe or a small car like Meg once, and that you will only wear for a few hours).