How To Elope With No Regrets

When I was growing up, I always knew I wanted to be married. I didn’t consider every detail of my fairy tale wedding, but I definitely expected it to be a large, traditional wedding. I’d even come up with some color combinations I liked while working at bridal stores and seeing all the color swatches sitting around. Of course, I was young and with the changing trends my colors of choice changed frequently.

As I grew older I began witnessing my friends plan large scale weddings over the span of one or two years, growing more and more stressed and more and more broke by the day. I became more independent each year as I built my career and took care of myself financially. As I watched my parents struggle financially it became clear to me that I was not one of “those people” whose parents were going to take care of her wedding (as the “tradition” goes). And, quite frankly, the older I got the more ridiculous that “tradition” really seemed. Understanding the value of money and not coming from a wealthy family made it seem silly to think that my parents might take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt in order to satisfy my “dream wedding”. Even if they wanted to foot the bill, I’d have a really hard time letting them.

My now husband and I had previously worked together, so when we began dating things moved quickly and though we had talked about marriage, we found out we were pregnant prior to getting engaged and making any plans. The idea of eloping had already become of interest to me, but now that we were planning an engagement during my pregnancy, I was really trying to think through our options.

Should we run away, just us and his son to somewhere beautiful? Half baby moon, half wedding? We could always have a big “reception” when we got back. That idea quickly disappeared as our to-do list of renovating a house, moving, and preparing for baby quickly grew longer.

Maybe we could go to one of those local chapels that are meant for eloping? Or city hall? And then have a big reception for our first wedding anniversary? Ya’ll…. Have you ever looked up those places? They’re drab. And/or just ugly. At least the ones in our town were. Poor decor. I mean, I was seriously considering eloping before baby, but I couldn’t just let go of all of my taste, which I happen to think is quite good. I still wanted something pretty, and nice. Something I loved in the moment, and that I would love to look back at.

After a quick google search that probably went something like,

“should i elope”,

I found a great piece of advice.

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Figure out what matters to you.

That made perfect sense to me. If my wedding day didn’t include the things that were important to me, it would not be my perfect day.

So, I made a list. What DID my dream wedding look like? What didn’t it look like?

I quickly nixed the idea of a quick and unmemorable elopement with a big reception to follow at a later date. Knowing me, I’d just never end up planning said reception because I’d feel it was just unnecessary at that point. I mean, we’d already be married… So, I decided we’d need a reception the day of, if we wanted one.

Honestly, the one thing my dream wedding DEFINITELY did not include was a big guest list. The bigger the guest list, the more planning. The more money. The more mess. I LOVE my extended family. It’s just that there’s SO MANY PEOPLE. If I invite Aunt Sally, then naturally her husband would come. And their adult children (my cousins), whom I love, but are also married, which then adds more people to the guest list and so on and so forth.. I think I would have considered it just being the three of us, but I got a lot of flack from my bestie and my mom and decided it would be nice to have some witnesses.

I wanted minimal coordination.

I knew I wanted fresh flowers. Formal invitations that matched our wedding theme. A nice wedding sign we could keep and hang up. Crazy fresh outfits for both of us. Classy reception. Beautiful wedding cake. First Dance. Photographer. Oh, and I’d always wanted to get married in this beautiful, quaint park I discovered years ago.

Somehow after discussing with my now hubby (who, BTW, did not have an opinion on most of this and kept saying it was all for me, though I did get his opinion on the details), we decided we’d try to get married in 4ish weeks. Something about how pregnant I was and how quickly I could plan this thing along with the availability of the restaurant we wanted the reception at is what dictated our wedding date.

I never wanted to get married in Spring.

But here I was with my dream man, planning an April wedding in approximately 4 weeks. While 7ish months pregnant. And remodeling a house. And working full time. And nesting. And I’ll tell ya what… Planning a small wedding/ elopement is a lot of work!! I honestly can’t imagine doing that for a big wedding. It was stressful while it lasted (not long), and then it was over. And we had the perfect wedding day.

I nixed the first dance on the day of because of the speaker situation at the reception venue. Either we were to hook a laptop up to the TV in the room to listen to a specific song, or it was the standard background music that we could dance to. It was stressing me out to try to figure out the coordination and I decided that I just didn’t care enough. So, we have yet to have our “first dance”. And I’m perfectly OK with that.