The day after my husband and I were married I turned to him and said, “Can we do that again?” After spending so much time picking a wedding dress, venue, flowers, food and all of the other fun stuff that comes with hosting a wedding I was bummed that the big day had come to an end.
To be honest I never wanted a big wedding. I wanted to get married on the beach in North Carolina surrounded by a very small number of family and friends. Somehow or another my family talked me out of that idea. It started with my parents. My dad asked, “How on earth my 80 year old grandmother would walk in the sand?” This was followed by questions like, “where will people stay” and “how many people are going to drive south for this event?”
I’ll be honest. I didn’t care how many people attended the event or what they did with themselves before and after the wedding. That sounds rather insensitive, but at the time I stupidly thought weddings were for the bride and groom. I later learned they are often for the parents of those getting married.
My tiny list of invitees grew exponentially as my parents and in-laws added relatives and friends I’d never met. My grandmother even wanted in on the action and asked to invite a table’s worth of friends to the big show.
The wedding list expanded from forty people to just over one hundred. My husband and I certainly could have said no at any point in time. After all, we paid for the wedding ourselves, but I could sense the excitement in our parents and didn’t want to disappoint them.
I spent a few months planning the big day. Visiting florists, picking out menus, invitations and all the rest of the things required of the bride-to-be. The day of my wedding was a sunny and beautiful seventy-five degrees. Everything went off without a hitch and I was glad everyone convinced me to host a traditional wedding.
In fact I was bummed by how quickly the day ended. I spent months thinking and preparing for that event; an event that only lasted four hours and due to the big list of attendees I wasted one of those hours greeting relatives and friends my parents and in-laws invited. Three hours of fun after months of preparation? It hardly seemed fair.
The next day I told my husband I wanted a do-over. Don’t get me wrong I do not regret the details of my wedding. It’s just that I wanted to throw another big party, with just the people I loved in the place that I love. I told my husband we’d renew our vows after ten years on the beach in North Carolina.
Well we never planned that big celebration. Thank goodness we didn’t. Rather than renewing our vows we spent our anniversary fighting off the norovirus. My son tripped off the event with seven straight hours of vomiting. My husband quickly followed suit and I came to the party about eight hours later.
As I laid on the floor next to my son’s crib I couldn’t help but laugh about the situation. It’s funny how things change over time. Ten years ago I wanted to throw a big party. These days I couldn’t care less about that. I just wanted to spend the day with my family.
I suppose my wish was granted, but certainly not in the way I expected.
Oh Man, that sounds terrible! I hope you are all feeling better!
We had a managable wedding for 50. When it was over I was just excited to get on the plan the next morning for our honeymoon! I wanted to do the honeymoon again. So we did.
Oh I love the idea of a honeymoon re-do! I was excited about the honeymoon too and told my husband we could have taken nine honeymoons if we skipped the wedding all together š
We went back to Iceland and stayed for twice as long, saw twice as much and ate twice as much. It was really an amazing experience and I’m so happy that we treated ourselves before our Little Miss came along. Sometimes I cringe when I think about how much we spent, even with staying in hostels and guesthouses, but it was totally worth it and we dream about going back again someday.
That sounds amazing! I don’t know if we’d go back to the same place we honeymooned, we went to Maui, but I would definitely love another big vacation. I keep telling my husband we have to wait 15 more years to travel without children, but I really hope we book a trip before that.
Oh gosh, what a way to spend any day, much less your anniversary!
We ended up doing the big party after our small courthouse thing and honestly, I felt the same that you did. After all that work – uhh.. was that it? No regrets, exactly, just a vague sense that it didn’t live up to all the hype. And mine was relatively unhyped.
That’s funny. I didn’t experience regrets either. It was more like how did that go so quickly and why on earth did I spend so much time planning for a four hour adventure.