Sorry, great aunt once removed Trudy. You?re not invited.
I?m finally starting to feel excited to get married. Notice how I say ?get married? ? and not ?have a wedding.?
There?s a difference, you say?
While I want my wedding day to be special, I don?t want it to be traditional, meaning I don?t care for having bridesmaids, I don?t want speeches given by siblings, and I don?t want father/daughter and mother/son dances. Oh, and I definitely don?t want it celebrated at a typical wedding venue or ?hall.?
Why am I such a cold-hearted bitch, you ask? I?m not.
All of those things simply don?t feel natural to me. They feel forced, showy and all of the other adjectives that fall under the ?societally correct? category. Like I always remind my fiance:
We are non-comformists who will not fall victim to the conservative expectations that society bestows upon us.
To clarify on the traditional wedding front, though, I do enjoy witnessing/being a part of all of those ?normal? wedding things I just mentioned when I attend celebrations of family and friends, but it just doesn?t feel right for my wedding.
When Jake and I explain this people, we get responses like, ?Are you sure?? ?You will want that,? and ?You will regret not doing it!?
Thank you for your concern, but we have made up our minds. The big wedding where we spend a year picking out decorations, bickering back and forth on who makes the guest list, and creating thoughtful save-the-date cards that will be tossed in the garbage doesn?t thrill me. Inviting hundreds of people to watch us make-out in a church makes me want to run away from it all.
We want a small and intimate celebration, perhaps at a trendy/chic restaurant where our families and closest of friends come together to eat, drink, dance (at their own freewill), and mingle.
Allow us to remind everyone that our wedding is about the two of us who are getting married. It isn?t about your feelings getting hurt because your cousin?s best friend wasn?t invited. It is about us committing to sharing our lives together, our style.
For Better or For Worse
Another big reason why we don?t want the big fancy shebang is because of money. It makes much more sense to us to spend thousands of dollars on a nice house and nice *things* instead of one nice party.
If marriage is the first step in starting our lives together, why can?t it be our decision ? without consequences and judgy eye-rolls ? to have the wedding we want?
When I envision what starting a life together looks like (we kind of already did that by having a child so I have a pretty good idea of what a Thursday night looks like), I see us walking through the doors of a beautiful open concept home where our Golden Retriever greets us with a tennis ball in his mouth ? not sitting at our kitchen table making comparisons from our peers? social media weddings.
I don?t want to start off this great, new chapter in my life trying to justify to my financially conservative partner why wearing a $3,000 wedding dress makes sense.
Unless I gain an unexpected opportunity that grants me that kind of quick cash (which I obviously would welcome), I?m sure I can find a white dress ? and elbow gloves! ? for less than that, and that I will be overjoyed by.
We are choosing to look at the reality and practicality of a wedding celebration instead of playing nice for everyone else?s sake. I don?t think we should be punished for that.
Thanks for reading!
