Ruminations on our June 2016 wedding originally posted on Medium
Being stubborn, over-confident and limited on funds, we decided to plan our own wedding. We heard a lot of advice from others, ignored it like others, and ended up with more advice to give. And we present it here, for future couples to ignore!
Focus on the photos
There are so many distractions with modern industrialized weddings that you can get into trouble quickly if you don’t remember your goals. Our main goal was to have great pictures. That’s it. Everything revolved around that. We figured that we would get old and forget what the heck happened anyway, but if we have pictures of us having a great time, we’ll remember having a great time regardless of actual outcome. Comparing the hours spent at the actual wedding with the lifetime hours spent remembering it, we decided to focus on the latter and we suggest you do too.
This made a lot of decisions easy. We held the ceremony in tall grass that was hard to walk in, where no wedding had ever been held before, in danger of getting hit by errant golf balls. But it was the most photogenic location, so there was no debate!
Hmmm, do we get 42 concentric plates to make the salad presentation fancy? No, pictures of plates are stupid!
Should we request all the groomsman rent tuxedos, even though they all own black suits, and I personally hate rental tuxes? Yes! It’ll be a cooler picture.
Do we provide no guidance, and let guests Snapchat the ceremony? No! Ban phones and give all high-res photos to anyone who asks. Grandma standing up to record everything with an iPad will make your wedding look like the dark ages when the world has moved on to eyeball computer implants.
Plan the energy
Unless you’re a SNL cast member, the folks that come to your wedding won’t be able to party non-stop for 8 hours in a row.
So manage the energy level of the room so that you don’t get a weak tapered exit at the end. To get the most bang for your buck, you really want to combine the peak of the excitement with the end of the celebration. That way everyone will remember the pinnacle of the night, and you can bias your spend towards the end of the night accordingly. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule)
Most people don’t plan the lulls in their wedding, and let external expectations or industry requests define them. This is a mistake. Stopping what you are doing, or getting other people to stop what they are doing to go cut up an expensive slab of frosted carbs is boring and creates a momentum change that doesn’t add anything to the fun or photos. Same with everything else, like chucking your bouquet at a teenage girl who doesn’t want it, or having an electronically amplified person mispronounce your wedding party’s names so they can do an awkward spin while half the guests slow clap. Get rid of it all and you can plan the downtime. For us, our wedding looked like this:
We opened the bar early, to loosen everyone up, combined dinner and speeches, then had a manufactured lull. One full hour for the food to settle, the hard partiers to get liquored up, and the older folks to pound some coffee. No agenda, no schedule, no pressure. (Our band had a minimum time you could pay for, so we actually payed the band to hang out in their dressing room for that hour.)
With three hours left and the sun down, the band came on and rocked it for the remainder of the time, ending on a high note.
Use The Force
One of the biggest mistakes you can make at a wedding is to have late night entertainment physically separate from an alcohol serving bar. Now we agree that booze is horrible in every dimension, but we decided to mentally suppress that and serve it.
Lots of it.
And wherever you put that bar, most humans will follow. If you pay for entertainment, and then put a bar around the corner, those locations will compete for attendance, and dilute each other down. With live entertainment, there are all these vestigial experiential feedback loops in our brains that make everything better (band performance, dance moves, high-fives) if more people are around. So guide people with the bar location and put it right next to the dance floor so everyone is in the same spot. There are no other good alternatives.
Our venue looked at me like I had two heads when I told them to tape off their beautiful, big, dark hardwood bar with draft beer, refrigerators, a sink and storage to put up a temporary bar like 50 feet away. But the bar near the dance floor was running balls outall night, and I believe was instrumental in putting us 43% over our projection of 4.5 drinks per person. Which we took as a success.
Bonus tip: if you want to have a cocktail hour in a different location, or just move people around for any reason, make sure to shut down and open up bars accordingly.
Extra Bonus Tip: Make the dance floor smaller than you think, as it’s better for it to be crowded than empty.
Empower the experts
Take the time to find good people, and then let them do their job. You have a limited amount of mental bandwidth, so save it for the hard decisions that actually (might) matter.
We asked the venue to pick the food and drink selection, instead of doing a tasting and pretending that we are food critics. It took us forever to find a photographer that was more interested in experimenting and taking artistic shots than photo-documenting a party, but once we did we had him pick the location of the ceremony, and let him design the whole timeline around lighting and sunset. Erin’s grandmother makes a mean baklava, so she was in charge of providing deserts. She ended up organizing a crowd sourcing campaign with all her friends from her church and we had an incredible assortment to munch on after dinner. We had no idea what they were actually going to bring, but we didn’t concern ourselves with it because as long as they were delicious, it just didn’t matter. (And they were!)
Communication Balance
If you don’t pay a planner, like us, you might want to consider calling everyone the week before and running through your plan. From what we gathered, this is a large part of the value that a Wedding Planner™ provides.
Our intended schedule located the cocktail hour outside overlooking the golf course. It actually happened inside the reception venue, while all the tables were being set up. Whoops.
We specifically picked the hotel where Erin got ready to have cool looking pictures out front, but never actually told the hotel our photography plans. We found out that day that there was another wedding at that time, which took over where we wanted to shoot! Whoops!
Bonus Tip: Cash solves problems too. A nice tip to the valet to hold traffic for one minute and we got at least one of the shots we wanted…
Respect
If you treat someone like a toddler, they will act like one. Explain what time you need to have people show up, and (here’s the key) WHY they need to be there, and they will manage themselves because they know the impact. If you start lying and telling people to show up at false early times assuming they will be late, you insult them, lose your credibility, and add confusion for no reason. Resist the urge and leave aunt Sally out if she can’t pick out her own outfit in time. And make sure she knows that!
Use a website
Instead of needing to lock in details early-on, we had our schedule and last minute weather info on our website. This meant that when we added a Friday night party, we didn’t need to re-mail anything.
We decided to manage our RSVP’s online too. This allowed us to publish the guest list in real-time, so invited folks could see who else was coming before making a commitment.
We had our RSVP form dumping into a google doc, and then we just published that doc to the web and embedded it in the Squarespace “CODE” block. Here’s the final version that we felt looked the best:
<iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/yourURL?gid=0&single=true&widget=true" height=”3600px” width=”100%”></iframe>
(We just increased the pixel height as more people started replying yes.)
No paying individually
Erin had some makeup/hair professionals in her suite the day of the wedding, and figuring out payment and tip with last minute changes and individual payments put the entire schedule behind. Don’t do this. Depending on your level of trust and cash position, either get the money up front, ask to be paid back later, or outsource payment to a non-schedule-constrained member of your clan.
Double-check the names
Then have someone else check them too. In a rush to send out invites, we each added names from the suggestion of each other, without being familiar with spelling. We spelled relatives and old friends names incorrectly, and we also got at least one spouse completely wrong(!) With familiar items the the brain can just read what it expects to see, and after finding out we had multiple errors, took a careful look at the list and found quite a few more. (The previous sentence has an obvious error in case you didn’t catch it.) Considering all the time we spent on the invite process, it was stupid and embarrassing.
Eat the frog
Like most humans, we have a bad habit of putting off tasks we don’t want to accomplish. With our wedding, we had such a huge list that right when all of our friends were coming into town, we were still coming up with lists of family photos to give to the photographer, and running around to banks trying to get cash.
(Special shout-out to the Wells Fargo manager of the massive GREENSBORO MAIN branch at 300 N Green Street in downtown Greensboro who laughed and smiled as she explained why she didn’t prefer to give out large amounts of cash, because of robbers, and made us go to another bank. We will update this post when we get around to closing Erin’s account(s) out of spite.)
It sounds dumb, and obvious, but try to finish up by the wedding day, so you can enjoy the time.
TL;DR
Optimize for the memories, double down on the ending, move people around with booze, don’t waste effort with things that don’t matter, and leave the last day free!
We were able to make a lifetime commitment in front of all our family and friends, and we think most people had a decent time celebrating with us. Looking back, we’d probably do it all again.
Afterward
We flew out the next day for a honeymoon in Turkey, Greece and Vietnam. Read about our adventures in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!