Every little girl has dreamt of her perfect wedding day as far back as she can remember, right?

Note: This story starts at the beginning. If you want to just jump to the part of the story with the actual wedding, click here.

Part One: The Dream

Not me. The first time I remember thinking about my wedding day was when I attended a close friend’s wedding in 2012.  I thought about it a lot that week.  Then I didn’t really think about it again until my boyfriend (at the time) and I started talking about marriage in 2016.

At the ripe old age of 24, I finally hit that time in a person’s life where their close childhood friends start getting married.  At that time, I envisioned my own wedding as a giant alcohol-fueled party.  No religious ceremony, no weird rituals and traditions I didn’t believe in.  Just me, my man, our families and friends, food, music, and booze.  I kind of like the tradition of someone who knows the bride & groom really well giving speeches, so maybe before or after dinner we’d have scheduled remarks, maybe some vows & an exchange of rings.  But mostly I wanted a party with all the people I cared about most having a good time in the same place at the same time.  I didn’t even need presents.

Several years later, the idea of a giant party sounds fun, but completely infeasible.

Besides, a wedding means a marriage, and what’s the point of marriage anyway?  Traditionally (#traditionalmarriage) marriage is an exchange of property or a contract between families.  (Hint: The woman is one of the properties being exchanged in this scenario.)  In the past few decades, this idea of “marrying for love” has become the norm in western culture.  But I’ve already been “in love” (either actually in love, or honestly tricked myself into thinking I was in love for a while) several times.  That’s kind of a low bar to set for marriage, in my opinion.  It’s easy to fall out of love.  Another reason people get married is to create a stable, socially acceptable environment to raise children in.  But that doesn’t really apply to me.

So why would I ever get married?  This is a question I wrestled with a lot over the past several years.

Part Two: The Reality

I finally found my answer.  The point of marriage is building a life together.  Whatever that life means to the two of you, it is your (plural) life. Marriage, in terms of the legal certificate of marriage, allows the government to recognize that these lives are together, not separate.  I don’t necessarily agree with the implications of needing government approval to build a life together.  But in our society, that “getting government approval” comes with legal and financial benefits.  And so, if I’ve already built a life with someone, if we are intertwined in a way that we never intend to untangle, then signing up for the government benefits for that conscious and joint decision just makes sense.

Anyway, that’s where I found myself at the end of 2016.  Hank and I had moved across the country together.  We built a life together.  We made a home together.  We supported each other through turbulent times.  We know and understand each other on a deep level – but we still accept and love each other.  We make long term and short term plans, as if we have all the time in the universe to spend together and plan for.  Marriage isn’t a necessity, but it “makes sense” under these circumstances, and is advantageous in several different ways.

Over the last few months of 2016, we talked about getting married.

• Should we do it? (We decided yes.)
• If so, when? (Makes no difference to us; we were already basically acting like a married couple.)
• How?  (No religion.)
• Who will be there?  There was no reasonable way to get my whole family and his whole family in the same place at the same time.  They’re spread all over the country, and very few of our individual family members and friends can afford to just pay for airfare and hotels to fly across the country, no matter how much notice you give them.  And it wouldn’t be fair to make one side of the family pay a ton of money to come to the wedding and the other side gets to have it nearby and not have to pay to travel.  There’s nowhere meaningful to meet in the middle to balance the inconvenience for everyone.

The reasonable thing to do, we decided, was to just go to the courthouse on our own, sign the paperwork, and then it would be done.  So, whenever we felt like it, we would just go.  We didn’t set a date, and we didn’t really tell people we were planning on doing it.  It was something we decided we wanted to do, but we were neither in a rush nor waiting for something in particular to happen.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to “get it over with.”  Not in a negative way.  It just seemed weird to me to have this pretty big decision made, but then to sit on it and do nothing about it.

Part Three: The Wedding

At the beginning of January 2017, we decided to get married on the two year anniversary of our first date.  (Anecdote: This was partially because I can never remember what the anniversary of our first date is.  The hope is that this would help me remember the date!  And it had the added benefit of me only having to try to remember one anniversary date instead of two.)  On Wednesday, January 11, we went to the courthouse to apply for marriage.  Pennsylvania has a three day waiting period between when you apply to get married and when you are allowed to get married (because getting married is more dangerous than buying a gun!).  We walked in, gave the clerk our passports, and answered a few questions… mostly questions about our parents.  The same day we applied, we made an appointment with a county judge to perform the wedding the following week.  (Fun fact: In Pennsylvania, you can do a “self-uniting ceremony” which doesn’t require a licensed officiant at all, just two witnesses that aren’t related to you.  This tradition comes from the Quaker faith, but anyone in PA is allowed to do it, for religious or nonreligious reasons.)

On Sunday, I decided I didn’t own any clothing I wanted to get married in, so I went to the mall.  I bought the first dress I tried on.  It was $50.  I happened to walk through JC Penney, and they had a Sephora inside.  I sheepishly walked to the display and waited for someone to ask if I needed any help.  I told them I needed eye and lip makeup to match the dress *holds up the dress*.  At first the salesperson suggested drastic, dramatic colors.  Then she asked what it was for.  I told her I was getting married in two days.  This caused her to change her approach entirely.  Something subtle, but that would make my eyes “pop.”  Lots of neutral colors and shimmer.  It looked good and not clownish.  And I made her help me write down every single step in applying it myself.  I ended up spending more on makeup and brushes than on my dress, I think.  (New eye shadow palette, new brush set, new lipstick.)

On Tuesday morning – the morning of my wedding day, I woke up, showered, got dressed (into my $50 wedding dress), and went to work.  I taught two classes, then went home.  I put on my makeup while Hank got dressed.  We drove to the courthouse and picked up our license.