So I wrote Friday’s post in a fit of being unable to keep it inside any longer. Because the secret is, throwing a wedding, even a stylish wedding, is easy. (Wedding planning is not, because it involves facing up to tradition, emotion, faith, aesthetics, family, money, and EXPECTATIONS, just to name a few.) But actually throwing a wedding? S-I-M-P-L-E. But there is so much cash involved (even in the blogging world) in making you think it’s hard and involves, you know, signs hand painted onto old plywood and letterpress and monogrammed chocolate and fancy lights and hand-knit whatevers…because if weddings are hard, it keeps you hooked on figuring them out. So. It was time for the real scoop. And, because Team Practical never ceases to amaze me, I came home to this email from Madeline, and oh-my-god she and her husband actually threw the wedding I described, exactly. I love you guys.
Hi Meg,
I’ve wanted to send you our wedding for AGES. But every time I start to write, I tell myself that nobody wants to hear about our ridiculously boring wedding planning.
But that’s the thing that I love about APW. Just when I feel like maybe I don’t belong in the wedding blog community because my wedding didn’t include enough details and pretty things (not a type A), you go and post about lazy, yet blogworthy weddings. Because, here’s the thing. We’re uber lazy. And I already have too much on my plate spending fifty hours a week at work and an extra fifteen hours a week commuting.
So the whole thinking, planning, carefully executing model was not our style, and as a result, our wedding more or less fell into our laps. Not that we didn’t have a general overview of how we wanted it to be. We were very specific in our assertion that it would be on the beach. (None of that overlooking the beach bullshit. I’m talking sand-in-my-train-why-did-I-buy-heels-for-this-thing beach wedding.)
We also wanted it to be stylish, but casual enough that people felt comfortable wearing everything from suits with pocket squares to jeans and t-shirts. And we wanted great pictures. Stare at them for hours, not just because I like to ogle myself looking really pretty, but because they’re sooooo goddamn gorgeous pictures. But details? Oh, hell no. Details sound like a lot of work…
So once we had our general overview, everything else just came together. We looked at one venue (a restaurant on the beach that’s been family-owned for thirty years) and booked it that day. They asked for zero security deposit and held our day for almost two years.
The leader of our band is a family friend we’ve known for years and he covers everything from classic rock to Amy Winehouse. And our home base/afterparty location was a beach home lent to us for the weekend by a family friend whose seventy-five-year-old father wanted nothing more than to hang out with seven pretty bridemaids while we got ready. And it was as easy as that. We put our wants out there, people offered their services and we didn’t worry if what we were getting was the “best option.” If it worked, we booked it. The only things we went out of our way on were the ceremony, the food, and the photographers, and all of our choices garnered rave reviews.
I wish I could say more about our wedding and what made it special, but I find myself lacking the words to describe the bigness, the happiness, and the energy of it. It’s like trying to describe how chocolate tastes. Some things are bigger than words. So I figured I’d send you some photos of our lazy, cheapish wedding and let them do the talking.
P.S. Our lazy wedding didn’t include any sort of roping off of the beach, so we ended up with random spectators at our ceremony. It was unbelievably cool to have people we’ve never met invested in our little ceremony. The next morning we went for a walk down the beach and a woman stopped us on the street to ask if we were the couple who got married the day before. She was there and she LOVED our wedding! We felt like celebrities.
Photos by Monica and Judson of Eve Event Photography
