Untraditional but perfect: How I planned my wedding

Written by Jenesy Gabrielle Burkett Fox

As children, many of us dream of what our wedding might look like. Outside of daydreaming about an extravagant cake, I can’t say I did. Marriage wasn’t a concept I really saw applying to me. Even now that I’m married, it’s hard to really pin down why. I grew up marching with my family for gay marriage legalization and believed firmly that families came in many shapes and forms. So it’s not truly that I didn’t see marriages or weddings that modeled what I might want. After all, my mom was the first in our family to come out (go mom).

Nonetheless, by the time I proposed to my wife, I had a Pinterest board full of wedding cakes and a few vintage wedding dresses and not much other idea of what a wedding might look like. For me, the most important part of a wedding was the fact that it led to a marriage. With marriage being a form of commitment, which I ultimately believe in.

From our engagement (and the very first time I held my wife’s hand if we’re being honest), we approached our relationship by prioritizing our values and the needs and priorities of ourselves and each other. In planning our wedding, we started the way all the good wedding blogs tell you: set a budget and a guest list. From there, you have an idea of the space you need and can start identifying venues. The budget was easy, but the guest list was more difficult. We like a lot of people. And there was a lot of family politics involved in setting a guest list. If you invite aunt Y, you have to invite uncle X, but can’t sit them at the same table, and so on.

Suffice to say, we spent a solid year looking at gorgeous venues and toying around with a 150-person guest list. And the more we thought about it, the more we weren’t interested in spending thousands of dollars on one day with over a hundred people we wouldn’t get to spend meaningful time with.

So, we took a step back and threw out what we thought a wedding should look like. When we got down to it, we wanted our essential people with us, to spend meaningful time with the people who were already active parts in our relationship and who we know will support us through our marriage. When we identified that, we pinned down about 40 people.

From there, we knew we wanted something that was intimate, not just in the guest list but in the activities and environment having only our closest people would allow. This very quickly led us to identify the celebration we wanted: a wedding weekend, somewhere cozy with lots of space for our nieces and nephews to play, somewhere we could grill and the adults could drink and play cornhole, and my wife and I could lazily sway together to Taylor Swift and One Direction — with some quick vows somewhere in the middle.

We rented a big Vrbo house that had the space we needed and the amenities we wanted such as plenty of fridge space, a grill, a good patio for dancing. And from there, everything else was relatively easy. We weren’t going for a fancy Pinterest wedding, so we borrowed most of our decorations and thrifted what we couldn’t borrow. We wanted our celebration to center our community, so all of the photography, our hair, flowers and decor were done by and with our family and closest friends.

We had our bachelorette parties Thursday night in separate parts of the house. Friday, the two of us went down to the river and finished writing our vows and danced to our first dance song just for us. Friday evening, we had a barbecue and played yard games, and we both got to connect and spend time with almost every one of our guests.

When it came to the ceremony, we knew we wanted something different from the traditional Christian and Seventh Day Adventist ceremonies we grew up with. We had our nieces and nephews as flower children, throwing fresh flower petals and giggling throughout the ceremony. We had a dear friend of ours officiate and focus the ceremony on our vows rather than a big speech about the institution of marriage.

One tradition that we somewhat held onto was readings, though we replaced scripture with excerpts from our favorite books that expressed our love and commitment to each other. We chose quotes from “Red, White & Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston, “Boyfriend Material” by Alexis Hall, “Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World” by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and “Mockingjay” by Suzanne Collins. We brought everyone to tears.

After all the details were said and done, we had a weekend with love through and through the center of it all. I really couldn’t have imagined the overwhelming feeling of rightness as I smiled into my wife’s cheek and our family and friends milled around a giant yard playing Olympic-level tetherball, laughing and shouting, a group of relatively separate people brought together by the two of us, connected in their love for us.

I really hope that as the years go on, I look back on my wedding as I do now: utterly in shock at the love and community of it all. I never could have imagined a wedding quite like the one we got, even when planning it. So, if you’re planning a wedding or hope to one day, I hope you hold onto yourself and your partner, and at the end of it all find more love than you bargained for.