Ach! Wedding!

There are many reasons why my husband and I chose to elope in February rather than having a wedding with guests. One of the reasons was that we didn't want to have our lives consumed by wedding planning for the year prior to our wedding. Did you know that the average planning time for weddings is a year?! And that isn't just a few hours on the weekends...that is a year of what equates to a part-time job (15 or more hours a week). I even know a woman who, by the time her wedding happens, will have planned it for 2 hardcore years! Craziness. That kind of investment in a single day of my life would most definitely throw me over the edge of sanity.

We thought by eloping that we had avoided having wedding planning consume much of our time. We were wrong. We are just ending up doing things in reverse order from most couples. Although, still to a much lesser extent than a traditional wedding would have required.

We couldn't get married and not tell people that we did. What does that mean? We needed to call and tell everyone we are really close to what we did and why we did it. Then we dealt with the reactions to the news. Some of which were fun and happy, some of which were angry and hurt.

We also needed to announce it to those that we didn't call. That involved deciding what kind of announcement, what it will look like, what it will say, and who it should be sent to. Then we had to follow through and do all those things. (This step is still in progress.)

Since we eloped, we also want to celebrate it in some manner with friends and family. This isn't always part of the eloping process but since our families haven't met before and we are going back to our hometown together, we need to have gatherings of various family members and a party with friends. That involves more deciding, planning, invitations, negotiations, discussions and finally, the follow-through.

My husband and I don't often bicker about things or get on each others nerves, but we sure are good at doing that lately. I blame it on the "wedding" planning. Luckily we had our time to have our moment before we faced the reality of what is necessitated by getting married.

What is crazy to think about was how truly easy and stress-free it was to actually get legally married and have our little ceremony independently from the legal ceremony. It was crazy simple and really nice. So, we don't regret doing it the way that we did. We just need to get over the shock of what we had to worry about as part of the aftermath.

After taking care of some wedding planning stuff for a majority of the day, I am devoting a big chunk of time for some much needed and much deserved knitting. I am finishing up the pair of socks I started as my wedding/honeymoon/travelling project.