When we were small, my best friend Lindsey had a notebook with worn edges that completely baffled me. In profile, the pages didn’t stack together as they should. They looked swollen and perhaps waterlogged, as if they’d been a victim of someone’s flooded basement. Once inside, it became clear the reason for these ruffled pages– she’d meticulously cut hundreds of images from magazines and pasted them in with an Elmer’s glue stick: billowy white dresses, men in crisp tuxedos, and multi-faceted diamond rings, page after page of luxuriously beautiful images of wedded bliss. I didn’t really know what wedded bliss was. I didn’t have a dream-wedding book; I had a self-diagnostic medical guide with dog-eared pages where I’d circled dermatological conditions that I thought were particularly cool. I tell you that to that to tell you this: I was not a conventional bride.
See how pretty scientific equipment is! Photo by Lindsey Key Fair LNK Photography
I met my husband John while I was in graduate school, working on my doctorate in microbiology. I had dated casually throughout my early twenties, but had very little free time and even less patience for the inane sort of interactions that dating entailed. John and I met on an online dating site and spent a few weeks exchanging delightfully flirty quips before I demanded we meet for lunch. That lunch turned into dinner and our first date lasted eight hours. Despite undeniable chemistry and every indication that John was the most upstanding man I’d ever met, I refused to call him my boyfriend for three months.
I told him once, around a mouthful of tikka masala, that I just didn’t want to see ANYONE every day. We could have one date a week, so I didn’t get tired of him. I told him that I considered romantic love and marriage to be social constructs and that I objected to the concept that women were property to be transferred from one man to another. Despite my obnoxious diatribes and protestations, he brought me flowers every time he showed up on my doorstep.
Eventually I would call him my boyfriend. Eventually I would ask him to move to North Carolina with me for my postdoctoral fellowship, and eventually we would move to Georgia together for my first big girl job. Eventually I realized that he was the ONLY person I wanted to see every day for the rest of my life, but it still took him almost six years to convince me to get married. John knew me to be a cynic, a relentless pragmatist, and a child borne of unhappily married parents, but still he persevered. Eventually, I relented because it would be the smart thing to do, “for tax reasons.” True to form, we have no proposal story. Instead, we have a story about that time 7 months ago when we decided over lunch at the Mexican restaurant with the second-best guacamole to have a party instead of going to the courthouse.
Lauren’s headpiece complemented her gorgeous bouquet of dried flowers. Photography by Lindsey Key Fair LNKPhotography
I felt wholly uncomfortable with the idea of a wedding, which I called “the W word” for the first month or so because the word burned on my tongue, never spoken aloud lest it turn into some grand affair that I didn’t want to have any part of. Still, a party sounded like fun. The idea evolved into a small intimate gathering for many reasons: I don’t like to be the center of attention, we were on a budget, and John likes to build things. We eventually landed on the idea of doing it four hours away in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I went to undergrad at the University of the South. My 10-year reunion was coming up in six months or so, and wouldn’t it be perfect if we just did it that Sunday afternoon while people were still in town from Homecoming?
Photography by Lindsey Key Fair LNKPhotography
I sent a few text messages to friends that were vague and used the phrases “a small get-together” and “a very small intimate W word.” They then lost their proverbial minds and I got immediate phone calls, aghast that I thought I could get away with such news through a text message. I’m pretty sure they thought I’d be an ardent feminist spinster until my dying breaths, rocking my RBG t-shirt at the old folks home. The whole idea of a wedding, no matter how tiny, filled me with anxiety. I think this stemmed primarily from the idea of cost and an event where I was the focus. I spend most of my life attempting to deflect attention away from myself, so wearing an elaborate gown and walking down an aisle with everyone staring at me sounded like a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. I was fortunate enough to have dear friends to deliver a dose of wisdom. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. It’s YOUR wedding.” So that’s what we did, exactly what we wanted. I pinned dog tuxedos and bouquets and pretty hairpieces I could never afford. I started crafting, John started building, and most importantly I started making an iTunes playlist.
Photography by Lindsey Key Fair LNKPhotography
Over the next few months, I had several friends there to gently nudge me when I was being overzealous, as I am wont to do. Anna, my long-time lovely friend, sorority sister, and (serendipitously) wedding planner, was there to advise that I
should have a few fresh flowers instead of purely succulents and dried flowers as I had planned, that I should buy collapsible trashcans since this shindig was to be in the woods, and that I should perhaps scale down the banquet table of food that I was planning to make entirely myself. I took most of her advice, but was staunchly stubborn regarding doing everything myself. I had notebooks full of packing lists, grocery lists, contact info, addresses, sketches of food tables, sketches of centerpieces, and recipes. I also chose to do this in the middle of the most hectic semester at my University. This led to me teaching three classes/labs a day the week before my wedding, trying to figure out how we were going to fit all of the succulents, the trays John had built, the dog, and everything else in the car, and wondering how many days chicken salad could realistically sit in the fridge it I made it on Wednesday instead of putting it off until the last second? Stressed was an understatement.
Photography by Lindsey Key Fair LNKPhotography
It was at 9:30 the night before we were leaving the next morning for Tennessee when I seriously began questioning my life choices. I had accidentally bought seeded grapes so I was standing over the sink, not packed, de-seeding grapes one by one so I could chop them for the chicken salad I was making to cater my own wedding. This was the moment I realized that I should have relinquished control; I should have paid someone else to do this for me. I almost beat my head on the cutting board, but didn’t want to risk a bruised noggin on my wedding day.
I was unbelievably fortunate to have lovely friends and family to make the whole weekend go on without a hitch. My little brother officiated our ceremony, my best friend Lindsey (the same one with the dream-wedding notebook when we were kids) took photos for us, and Anna and her husband Justin went into full day-of-coordinating mode to pull the whole thing off. This was old hat for them, as their business Sweet Grass Weddings specializes in weddings just like mine—quick, tiny, casual. I had spent months collecting milk glass from goodwill and planting succulents and surreptitiously borrowing test tubes from the lab at work, but when the day came I gave Anna and Justin the reins. It was the best decision I could have made. The stress vanished and they turned my lists and sketches into a living breathing beautiful dream. More than just the logistics of setting up, the purely aesthetic touches were enough that they took my breath away. Despite my reservations about marriage in general, despite my many proclamations that we “should have just eloped,” being able to stand there in the woods surrounded by people who love me and make those promises to the man I adore was the most perfect thing I could have ever imagined.
If I could rewind six months, I don’t know that I would do anything differently. Yes, it was stressful, and a great deal of that was stress was self-inflicted by being so fiercely and stubbornly independent. I’d like to say that I would go back and allow Anna and Justin to do the tedious bits for me as Anna encouraged me to do many times (I’m sure it would have saved me a great deal of stress and anxiety), but in the end I had to do my tiny wedding my way. I can honestly say, however, that it would not have happened without my support team, even just for emotional support. The lesson I can take from my halting and meandering trip to the altar (or gazebo in the woods, rather) is that same advice that was repeated over and over again by my wisest friends—it’s YOUR wedding. You can do literally whatever you want and utilizing resources available to you is the best way to make it through with your sanity intact. Take full advantage of friends or family who want to help participate or employ an amazing company like Sweet Grass Weddings that can listen to your vision and take the stress off of you completely. In a slightly different universe where I’m not so stubborn, I would have done the latter. In the end, I can say that I do believe in marriage. Standing in front of people we cared about to make our pledges to one another meant more than I ever thought that it could, much more than a piece of paper that might save me on my taxes next year. I’ve learned that marriage is something you define for yourself, not something that society forces upon you. And to be honest, it’s pretty lovely.
Photography by Lindsey Key Fair LNKPhotography
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