Marriage plans
Feb. 28th, 2011 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAfter a certain amount of internal musing, the currently prominent plan is to have a wedding (with vows, contracts, awnings, as many of our friends and relatives as we can manage, etc) in spring 2012, but the necessary legal arrangements beforehand on 29th Feb 2012, the anniversary of our officially getting together three years ago (with just us, parents and two-three siblings or witnesses each).
The reasons for this are:
* We really want to be able to count the anniversary from our existing anniversary. I was surprised we felt strongly about it, but we did.
* We don't want a church wedding or a synagogue wedding, and we want to have the wedding in Cambridge town, and there are no venues with civil wedding licences we like there.
* We would rather have the wedding in spring when there's slightly more light, at a weekend, and outside academic term, when some guests will find it slightly easier to make it.
Obviously we can arrange anything we want, but I want to ask if splitting the event like that sounds sane to other people?
The biggest risk is that the actual ceremony will feel like it "won't count", but if it's arranged beforehand, and includes all of the things we find significant, we think it will feel ok.
The other possibilities are (a) hold the wedding on the 29th, even though it's midweek (b) forget the anniversary, and have the wedding in spring, with the registry office arrangements earlier that day, or the day before (c) find a civil wedding licensed venue we like.
The other, related, question, is that we planned to, instead of taking the two of us half way round the globe on a honeymoon, take away a medium sized group of close friends for a week to a cottage (or castle) somewhere in the UK. Does that also sound sane?
We hope to get this sorted _now_, as in, this week if at all possible. At which point we will have a date and a venue and can move on to other planning, and can tell people a provisional date.
The reasons for this are:
* We really want to be able to count the anniversary from our existing anniversary. I was surprised we felt strongly about it, but we did.
* We don't want a church wedding or a synagogue wedding, and we want to have the wedding in Cambridge town, and there are no venues with civil wedding licences we like there.
* We would rather have the wedding in spring when there's slightly more light, at a weekend, and outside academic term, when some guests will find it slightly easier to make it.
Obviously we can arrange anything we want, but I want to ask if splitting the event like that sounds sane to other people?
The biggest risk is that the actual ceremony will feel like it "won't count", but if it's arranged beforehand, and includes all of the things we find significant, we think it will feel ok.
The other possibilities are (a) hold the wedding on the 29th, even though it's midweek (b) forget the anniversary, and have the wedding in spring, with the registry office arrangements earlier that day, or the day before (c) find a civil wedding licensed venue we like.
The other, related, question, is that we planned to, instead of taking the two of us half way round the globe on a honeymoon, take away a medium sized group of close friends for a week to a cottage (or castle) somewhere in the UK. Does that also sound sane?
We hope to get this sorted _now_, as in, this week if at all possible. At which point we will have a date and a venue and can move on to other planning, and can tell people a provisional date.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-02 08:55 am (UTC)But what you're doing is slightly different from that because, on some level, you clearly do see the legal ceremony as the "real" one - you'd be counting it and not the friends/family ceremony the "real" one for wedding anniversary purposes. I think that confuses the issue - both for your guests (some of whom I would have thought will find it quite confusing (and potentially offensive) that you had a wedding that they were invited to but you count another date as your wedding anniversary) and for you as a couple. To expand a bit on how it might be confusing for you as a couple, if there are ceremonial aspects to the friends/family wedding that are really important to you, you as a couple have your emotions around getting married split between two ceremonies which I at least would have found strange.
I think more straightforward would be having the legal ceremony on the date that you want and having a celebration on a later date with friends and family that isn't a "wedding" or a "ceremony" but just a large party. That way, it's pretty clear what's the wedding and what's a celebration of the wedding.
But, at the end of the day, obviously it's what you both want that matters.