Don't Back Down

I was reading today that the average wedding costs nearly nineteen thousand dollars. On March 22nd of this year, Denise and I were married and ours cost less than $8000, including the rings and honeymoon.

The secret? We kept it small. We started off trying to figure out who to invite. The first problem we ran into is that we were planning on getting married quickly. No, she wasn't pregnant. We were trying to avoid having to make two house payments, so we wanted to combine things as soon as possible. This automatically excluded a number of people who simply wouldn't be able to make arrangements on such short notice.

After realizing that we couldn't invite everyone we wanted to, it became an issue of who we had to invite. Naturally, we had to be there, as did our boys. Beyond that, the only people that both of us needed to be there were our parents. So that was the entire guest list. That's right. A total of 8 people at our wedding. Okay, if you count the minister, the organist, the photographer and his wife, the video guy and his wife, there were actually 14. But you get the point.

Having a small wedding allowed us to share time with those that were the most important to us and focus not on the planning, but on the wedding itself. Since the guest list was so small, the cake could be small (and in fact was still too big!), the dinner could be small yet elegant, and best of all, we could all fit into one limo to go to dinner! The boys loved it because they could walk up and down the limo without so much as having to duck.

Beyond that, we turned to friends for photography and video services, we were able to book a cozy chapel instead of a massive sanctuary. We stayed at a small bed and breakfast on the lake for the wedding night, and then a charming place in the mountains for our honeymoon. Because we didn't do anything extravagantly, the whole event allowed us time to focus on our families and each other, rather than trying to figure out how we would get out from under all the debt we were creating.

It couldn't have turned out better. Interestingly, many friends and coworkers remarked both before and after the wedding that they wished they had done things this way. Sure, we missed out on a pile of wedding presents - but hey. We both had houses, so we really didn't need to figure out what we would do with three blenders. And after all, isn't the wedding for those getting married, rather than those who are watching?