What, in your eyes, is the purpose of a wedding?

This is a great question, and resonates with some of the thinking and reading I've been doing of late. And honestly - FH and I differ slightly on the why (but thankfully not on the what, which is a 10-20 person relaxed 'destination' wedding about 3hrs away from us :)

To me personally, my wedding is not that big of a deal. Mentally, I've already made my commitment to love and honor him, in sickness and in health, til death do us part. So the wedding itself is in one part just the formalization of that into law, a public binding together in a way that can not be undone. It is making the private, public. In this way, we really don't want our wedding to be an event, in the sense of stage-managed theatre, a production, full of hoopla and flourish. Those kinds of wedding are gorgeous. But for ourselves, while we see the value in having a public ceremony (hence we don't want to elope privately), we also don't want it to have a big event. Essentially, we mentally don't see the day before we're married as hugely different from the day after we're married (except that the day afterwards we get immigration, finance and healthcare paperwork exploding everywhere :)

The other aspect for us is that we'd like to be surrounded by our closest loved ones who have supported us when we publicly commit our love and support to each other. While we aren't beholden to them we also accept that they have certain expectations around the wedding and some of the mechanics of the day is for them. It's probably going to be the only time in our lives that we are all together with that particular group of family and friends (we're talking 7 cities across 2 continents).

/r/weddingplanning Thread