So how should your wedding go? What should you expect from it?
If you expect it to go flawlessly, that’s wishful thinking. I’ve been to enough weddings to honestly say that things rarely go exactly as you hope on your special day, despite all the planning you put into it. We’re only human. Things happen when we least expect them.
To make your wedding day manageable, you need quality people who will go out of their way to make it as special as possible. That begins with a dress, a good caterer, and a good photographer — or better yet, a great one.
Everyone looks for a special location for their wedding, somewhere they can return to years later — a place that will still be there after a lifetime together, where you can stand in the exact spot, hold hands, and look back on your lives. I’d suggest something simple: a tree and a rock at an outdoor wedding. Something that will remain long after a venue goes out of business, a house or property is sold, and the ground where you took your vows doesn’t turn into a cornfield.
Here’s some free advice. Go to a camping area, a national monument, or a federally protected place that is beautiful and that you both enjoy visiting, camping at, or hiking in. Find a pretty tree with a boulder (“I like that boulder. That’s a nice boulder…” — Donkey). That tree could burn down in a forest fire, and the boulder could be washed away in a flood, but the chances of that happening are slim compared to human nature, which is to change things on a whim — sell property, put a parking lot on a piece of ground, or simply tear things down, modifying a memory. Find that boulder and that tree and have your wedding there. Chances are it will always be there.
Weddings are fascinating little social experiments. People try to engineer a perfect day, but memory doesn’t care about perfection — it cares about meaning. The moments couples talk about twenty years later are almost never the perfectly scheduled ones. They’re the human ones: the wind grabbing the veil, the nervous laugh, the uncle who cried and swore he wouldn’t. The camera’s job isn’t to record a ceremony; it’s to preserve evidence that two imperfect people actually showed up and chose each other anyway. Pick a great photographer — pick me or someone much better. The risks are too great to overlook.
