The best day ever

We have a friend who is a wedding DJ and has been to hundreds of weddings over the years. About a year after our wedding, unprompted he said:

Your wedding has to be top five I have ever been to. What a fun night.

I am always curious when people say things like that what is behind it, so I spent the rest of the happy hour asking people who had been to our wedding, what their remembrances of the day were.

“Everyone seemed to be having a good time.”
“No one seemed stressed.”
“Everything seemed to go as planned and so everyone was having fun.” “It seemed like you wanted to have a good time.”
“Nothing went wrong so no one was freaking out.”

“The train crew.”

I started thinking about the day, and some things people were saying weren’t true! Things did go wrong, of course they did, all weddings have some issue pop up, but the biggest thing that kept the day fun was that we wanted it to be the best day ever. We agreed that it was going to be the best day every no matter what happened. Not in a esoteric way, but in an incredibly intentional way.

Before the wedding, my wife and I sat down and made some rules.

We were paying in cash for everything. We worked so much and skipped eating out and gifts and fun and everything for about two years to pay for it. We were privileged to be able to do this but it was incredibly important to us, because if something goes really wrong we won’t be paying for it for years. We both believed that the stress of knowing we still had to pay for these things would make the expectations so much higher and the stress level so much more.

We get to decide the traditions we want and the ones we don’t want. My wife’s dress was a beautiful blue bridesmaid dress. We went to the dress store with the largest part of our budget ready to buy whichever dress she wanted. She tried on beautiful dresses but none of them were right, and as a joke she said “I should try that blue dress on the clearance rack!”. (She knows I love a clearance sale <3) When she put it on it was perfect, but then she put it back and tried on a few more “traditional” dresses. Then the blue was back, and she looked so happy in it. Done. Were there people who thought it was odd to wear a blue dress as a bride? I’m sure. Did either of us care? Not even a little bit.

We didn’t care what happened, we were going to have fun. And trust me, things happened. Family drama? Yep! Decoration drama? Yep! Did we care? Not one single bit. In the middle of our ceremony, in the affectionately called “Wedding Pit”, a train track maintenance crew stopped above us and shouted down “Hey, you getting married?” and then sat and watched the rest of the wedding from above. This caused our officiant to forget to make me say “I do”, which has become a running joke at our house.

Remember in the last paragraph I said “wedding pit”? Our venue had a special display in the room we were supposed to use and it would have been a huge pain for them to move it (miscommunication at the railroad museum), so we decided to move to the wedding pit, and it worked so much better than the original room would have. Our Deaf attendees could see the interpreters from every location, and we ended up with an amazing picture of everyone at our wedding, which we never would have gotten without the wedding pit.

Those rules made it so much easier to just allow the day happen. The only thing that had to happen that day was that we got married. Everything else was just extra.

The Wedding Pit