I’ve been thinking a lot about wedding planning lately — and not just because I’ve been planning a wedding for over a year now. I’ve been thinking about the way we think about wedding planning. Specifically a partner’s involvement in the whole process.
After reading “Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker, I gushed to Chris about how it completely changed my perspective. He was not only open to these ideas, it inspired him and led to some of the best conversations and ideas.
Why do we leave partners out of the conversation? Why do they not care?Probably because we are focusing on all the wrong things when it comes to weddings. The colors, the stationery, the window dressing. And we turn them off to the idea that a wedding is anything more than playing dress up to which they begrudgingly agree to.
No, a wedding when designed collectively can (and should) be so much more. Maybe I’m feeling overly sentimental about the whole thing but this process has deepened our relationship, challenged us to dig deep into what we really value and reaffirmed our established values together. We are coming out of this process better than when we went into it and in many ways I’m more sure today that Chris is my true life partner because we’ve exercised new muscles in our relationship.
We chose to get married on the farm before it really meant something to us. At the time, it was a money saving move. Now we stand in those fields and talk about the future — the people who will enjoy meals there, the friends we will welcome into our home that’s not yet built, and the children that will hopefully run through those grasses one day. I’m certain we wouldn’t be so deeply tied had we not spent so much time digging into the purpose and meaning behind why we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.
Why did we want 48 of our closest friends to fly across the country for a weekend?
Why this place?
Why this way of doing things?
Those questions led us to people who bought into the vision and continues to place people in our path who champion our goals. I couldn’t imagine this process without Chris.
We are both entering into this union together. It’s his day as much as mine. It’s our life and to plan a wedding without him feels like sacrilege. To plan a wedding that’s simply a giant party feels untrue to who we are. To abdicate our power to trends and a societal norm oversimplifies the weight of the moment.
So no, it’s not “my day”. It never was, it was always ours.