When I proposed I was focused on wanting to be married to my wonderful parter, with no idea what a wedding for us would look, like! In actual fact the idea of a traditional Wedding is made up of endless layers of anxiety.
Let’s list them, in no particular order
- I can’t imagine that being the centre of attention could feel anything but mortifying.
- Getting stressed finding and then spending £1000 plus on a dress I’m wearing once and never again is insane. Plus outfits for anyone else in a bridal party. Plus just all the nonsense of making appointments in a bridal shop, no thanks.
- Finding a venue that can do everything to an acceptable standard and in a good location for everyone seems impossible.
- Finding photographers, catering, hair and make up and entertaining is so much work. I hate calling people on the phone and I’d probably have to do that a lot.
- Wedding venue food is never good, and it’s so expensive! Plus the day involves so much hanging around hungry while the photos are happening, and as I guest I hated that bit.
- Coordinating lots of people from different areas of our lives is stressful.
- I don’t have any friends close enough that I could ask them to be a bridesmaid, and I’m no close enough with my (decade) younger sister.
- My Dad walking me down the aisle would feel weird as a bizarre patriarchy thing but also we just don’t have a particularly close relationships (it’s not bad at all, we just don’t talk much or hug) so it wouldn’t feel natural.
- I’m not particularly close with any of my family, I don’t feel like they know me that well (even could say the same for most of my friends) so a traditional wedding with speeches etc would feel fake and performative (because my social anxiety can’t imagine anyone had anything genuine to say about me).
- I’d be too stressed about the party and self-conscious about people watching to enjoy the ceremony.
- I don’t really enjoy large gatherings and neither does my partner. We’re hardcore introverts. Lots of people and activity and noise is exhausting, and I think I’d be ready to call it a night before the evening even started!
- The last two weddings I’ve been to have been such long days, and I’ve ended up feeling tired and snippy, rough from too much alcohol and not enough food, overwhelmed by the noise and with my social anxiety threatening to tip me into a depression. I took to going to sit quietly in a bathroom stall to recenter myself! I can’t have that at my own wedding!
- I barely even saw my friends who were getting married, after travelling hours to the wedding.
- The whole event is ridiculously expensive and I can’t imagine that amount of money would ever feel “worth it” given the above.
Plus the cherry on top is my fiancé is divorced, so his whole family and friends have already attended a traditional wedding. And his ex-wife is a good friend and we would invite her with the rest of his friends which would feel extra weird, even if we are all on great terms! I will be thinking that everyone would be sitting there thinking about that!
So yeah, a traditional wedding was never really an option and that left the local registry office (there are actually some very nice ones in our area) or some kind of elopement. The registry office is too close to home and so I’d about people feeling offended if I didn’t invite extended family. I elope further away I feel like that’s less of an issue.
I started out quite taken with the idea of eloping to New York or Orlando so we could go to the theme parks as our honeymoon, especially as we had an amazing time together in Orlando in 2022. It seems so easy to get married in the USA and it’d be a little adventure. But the 2024 election result was disappointing and we will be avoiding the USA for a while… (Good luck everyone, maybe we’ll be back if we all survive the next four years…).
That off the table we thought about Gretna Green as it’s an “acceptable” thing people do for cheap and easy elopements and it had a romantic history (including my fave Devil in Winter!), even if it’s now a complete tourist trap and a conveyor belt. It’s actually next to a retail park. I read some Reddit posts about it and their simple packages are good prices for a reason, sounds like the hotel isn’t that nice and you risk bad photographs and make up.
We’ve now found another venue that’s not too far past the Scottish border that ticks a lot of boxes for us, and that’s helped to form a plan finally of what a wedding might looks like. I’m hoping we can get a video tour this week and ask them some questions, but we’re excited about it.
With the wedding but becoming clearer that’s left me trying to figure out what a wedding celebration party should be. It won’t be a reception because it’ll happen weeks or months after the wedding, so it doesn’t have the same kind of Special Event tag and I feel bad asking people to travel for just a party to celebrate an event they weren’t at. And as above, my fiancé and I aren’t even partiers (he’s actually teetotal) so we could end up still paying thousands for a party we’ll want to leave at 9pm!
I tried looking at venue options, I thought about marquees in gardens, different ways it could be more of a day time event and how we could entertain guests… But none of it felt right.
I talked to my partner about it, he made some great points about why we wanted to do the elopement in the first place, and we decided keeping it simple and splitting up the celebrations would make more sense for us.
All our family are pretty local, nobody is more than an hour’s drive, so we can hire a restaurant or a private dining room, to celebrate over a nice dinner with our extended families. Our families should mix pretty well, our parents already get on.
Then we can arrange separate events for our friends, who all live much further afield (one with a baby due early 2025) so logistically it’s more of a challenge. I now love the idea of taking my friends for a special fancy dinner, and going for cocktails and a dance if we feel like it (we are in our late 30s now!). We can make an afternoon of it before too, maybe find some crazy golf! This way we actually get to spend quality time together, almost like eloping as a mini wedding reception.
Now I finally have this plan in my head I might finally be able to stop agonising and start getting excited about it!
(but also I still have a dress, hair, make-up, photographs, a hen do? to consider…)
