At the risk of sounding old, do the kids these days face those same pressures about weddings? Reading this tool me right back to our wedding and the blitz of suggestions, hints, and similar made both my wife’s family and mine. The wording on the invites alone raised the threat level to Defcon 5.
“Get married at the beach?! (Gasp). What will people say?”
“You know you really should invite (insert group of 8 here). It’ll be a mess if you don’t.”
At any rate, I hope they get married on beaches, in parks, or wherever they want.
P.S. happy to hear about the peppers! Ours are just starting to come in, and I’m a little worried, this year might be a bust.
I don't know if they do! My friends' kids are only recently becoming adults so I haven't been to a wedding in forever. I do feel like the young adults around me are talking less and less about marriage and kids, though. They're cluing in that raising kids is expensive!
My kids are 30 and 32, and both got married within the last four years. My kids didn't feel any of the "conventional" pressures (thanks to atheist parents and no grandparent pressure), so no church wedding or institutional demands, but man they really felt the pressure of an age that is obsessed with images. Both brides poured over Instagram wedding photography and put this huge emphasis on finding the "right" photographer who would give them good photos for IG. (We had my uncle Joe take photos and they sucked.)
and no, you weren't the only teenaged girl who hated shopping for clothing. My mother pretty much had to drag me into stores and do her best to make me buy something, ANYTHING other than my go to of jeans, flannel shirts, t-shirts, and work shirts.
and yes, my friends all wanted my mother who LOVED shopping for teenaged girl clothing, lol
Gorgeous photo of your wedding day, and gorgeous reflection, too. I snickered at Pachelbel and Michael W. Smith, which so perfectly captured a few weddings I attended in the mid-90’s. Also, I’m so jealous of your writer meet-up!
My friend is getting married this weekend (at 43! for the first time!) so this Substack is exactly what I wanted to read right now. I feel like weddings are the perfect ways for people to utilize their out-of-the-box thinking skills. Since they are fraught with traditions and formality and expensive prices, it's so easy to get sucked into paying for so many things that you never would in "real life."
Also, you look gorgeous in your sage green prom dress :)
I love this so much. (Do I write that on all your posts?) I kind of liked school shopping (in the 60s), mostly because my sisters and I got to leave our small town and go to Seattle for the day and have milkshakes in the Paul Bunyon Room at Frederick and Nelson's. I have hated clothes shopping for decades now, though, and so did my daughter (who is 40). When she needed something, we never spent more than 43 minutes getting it. She wore pink Converses to her senior prom. It's the last time she wore color (eye roll).
Loved this post! I’m not engaged and don’t plan to be for awhile but I’m at the age where friends are getting married left and right and it’s always interesting to see what type of wedding someone has. I’ve heard a lot about the pressures from family to invite a ton of people and I agree with a previous commenter who said that todays weddings are more photography focused, not in a heirloom photo way but in an Instagram/social media way. A lot of people I know don’t really post much at all but weddings get a ton of attention on IG/FB etc.
I have similar feelings about white and am toying with the idea of something with a bit more color, the dress you chose looks amazing! And so happy to see The Waterboys call out! My dream first dance song is a subdued cover of “How Long Will I Love You” that flows into the original to get people dancing!
I had a magical park wedding (hard to call a giant lawn with 20 beer-table benches and 4 grills a garden). It cost 200 dollars to rent the space for the day, it had a large parking lot and actual separate men and women bathroom buildings. I rented a giant truck that held 180 (rented) folding chairs and 25 umbrellas as well as a kanopy for us to get married under and drove it all up to the park at 7am where I met a couple friends and we set the entire space up ourselves. Of course there were countless fires to put out all day long since we had no planner or any idea what we were doing.
We hired a klezmer trio to roam around playing music throughout as well as during the ceremony. Because I'm a control freak and a video professional, I asked a couple film friends to film the ceremony, and wore a wireless lavalier mic, whispering instructions to the camera people as my wife and I stood at the altar (or chuppah, as we are Jewish; that, and the breaking of the glass -- we used plastic -- were all the traditonal Jewish elements we included). Imagine me whispering "zoom in" right before I proudly proclaimed "I do."
It's easy for me to say, having a small family and no one else paying for any of it, but making the day the way we wanted it, not how anyone else wanted it, was so important.
Oh Jen and Bryan, happy anniversary! What a gorgeous post about a wonderful day! Your paragraph about the line FINALLY being crossed made me spit out my coffee - I'm still giggling now - but with these words you've said absolutely everything:
"None of this was anything I had imagined my wedding would be like, yet it was so perfectly us."
Your dress is gorgeous! I wore green for my wedding, too. 💚 A dressmaker friend made my outfit - I asked her for 'the wedding equivalent of jeans and a jumper', and she came up with something which was absolutely perfect.
At the risk of sounding old, do the kids these days face those same pressures about weddings? Reading this tool me right back to our wedding and the blitz of suggestions, hints, and similar made both my wife’s family and mine. The wording on the invites alone raised the threat level to Defcon 5.
“Get married at the beach?! (Gasp). What will people say?”
“You know you really should invite (insert group of 8 here). It’ll be a mess if you don’t.”
At any rate, I hope they get married on beaches, in parks, or wherever they want.
P.S. happy to hear about the peppers! Ours are just starting to come in, and I’m a little worried, this year might be a bust.
Etc.
I don't know if they do! My friends' kids are only recently becoming adults so I haven't been to a wedding in forever. I do feel like the young adults around me are talking less and less about marriage and kids, though. They're cluing in that raising kids is expensive!
My kids are 30 and 32, and both got married within the last four years. My kids didn't feel any of the "conventional" pressures (thanks to atheist parents and no grandparent pressure), so no church wedding or institutional demands, but man they really felt the pressure of an age that is obsessed with images. Both brides poured over Instagram wedding photography and put this huge emphasis on finding the "right" photographer who would give them good photos for IG. (We had my uncle Joe take photos and they sucked.)
LOVED this story!!
and no, you weren't the only teenaged girl who hated shopping for clothing. My mother pretty much had to drag me into stores and do her best to make me buy something, ANYTHING other than my go to of jeans, flannel shirts, t-shirts, and work shirts.
and yes, my friends all wanted my mother who LOVED shopping for teenaged girl clothing, lol
Gorgeous photo of your wedding day, and gorgeous reflection, too. I snickered at Pachelbel and Michael W. Smith, which so perfectly captured a few weddings I attended in the mid-90’s. Also, I’m so jealous of your writer meet-up!
My friend is getting married this weekend (at 43! for the first time!) so this Substack is exactly what I wanted to read right now. I feel like weddings are the perfect ways for people to utilize their out-of-the-box thinking skills. Since they are fraught with traditions and formality and expensive prices, it's so easy to get sucked into paying for so many things that you never would in "real life."
Also, you look gorgeous in your sage green prom dress :)
Hey, that was a real beauty of a story.
I love this so much. (Do I write that on all your posts?) I kind of liked school shopping (in the 60s), mostly because my sisters and I got to leave our small town and go to Seattle for the day and have milkshakes in the Paul Bunyon Room at Frederick and Nelson's. I have hated clothes shopping for decades now, though, and so did my daughter (who is 40). When she needed something, we never spent more than 43 minutes getting it. She wore pink Converses to her senior prom. It's the last time she wore color (eye roll).
Loved this post! I’m not engaged and don’t plan to be for awhile but I’m at the age where friends are getting married left and right and it’s always interesting to see what type of wedding someone has. I’ve heard a lot about the pressures from family to invite a ton of people and I agree with a previous commenter who said that todays weddings are more photography focused, not in a heirloom photo way but in an Instagram/social media way. A lot of people I know don’t really post much at all but weddings get a ton of attention on IG/FB etc.
I have similar feelings about white and am toying with the idea of something with a bit more color, the dress you chose looks amazing! And so happy to see The Waterboys call out! My dream first dance song is a subdued cover of “How Long Will I Love You” that flows into the original to get people dancing!
I had a magical park wedding (hard to call a giant lawn with 20 beer-table benches and 4 grills a garden). It cost 200 dollars to rent the space for the day, it had a large parking lot and actual separate men and women bathroom buildings. I rented a giant truck that held 180 (rented) folding chairs and 25 umbrellas as well as a kanopy for us to get married under and drove it all up to the park at 7am where I met a couple friends and we set the entire space up ourselves. Of course there were countless fires to put out all day long since we had no planner or any idea what we were doing.
We hired a klezmer trio to roam around playing music throughout as well as during the ceremony. Because I'm a control freak and a video professional, I asked a couple film friends to film the ceremony, and wore a wireless lavalier mic, whispering instructions to the camera people as my wife and I stood at the altar (or chuppah, as we are Jewish; that, and the breaking of the glass -- we used plastic -- were all the traditonal Jewish elements we included). Imagine me whispering "zoom in" right before I proudly proclaimed "I do."
It's easy for me to say, having a small family and no one else paying for any of it, but making the day the way we wanted it, not how anyone else wanted it, was so important.
Oh Jen and Bryan, happy anniversary! What a gorgeous post about a wonderful day! Your paragraph about the line FINALLY being crossed made me spit out my coffee - I'm still giggling now - but with these words you've said absolutely everything:
"None of this was anything I had imagined my wedding would be like, yet it was so perfectly us."
Your dress is gorgeous! I wore green for my wedding, too. 💚 A dressmaker friend made my outfit - I asked her for 'the wedding equivalent of jeans and a jumper', and she came up with something which was absolutely perfect.
Love this, and also adore the wedding dress! Perfect!