Why do it this way?

It's quite a vulnerable and scary effort to write a book in public, but here I am. Subscribe to the email newsletter to follow along with my journey!

Why should you have an intentionally planned wedding?

After having created thousands of weddings I would, quite bluntly, say that if you’re going to even have a wedding, let it be with intent, or don’t have one at all.

After all, you don’t actually need a wedding to get married.

Some people say they’re “not really into weddings” and those people are so very welcome to head down to the marriage registry office or find a local celebrant to help you with the legals and get it done without the beauty of a wedding.

The truth is though, anyone I’ve ever met who’s not “really been into weddings” would actually love to have an artistically created and inspired event that made them feel like a million dollars and actually celebrated them in an authentic and meaningful way. No-one is actively wanting to not feel good, it’s just that for so many, weddings as they have been don’t feel good.

Weddings in times past have been all about family expectations, religious requirements, traditions and the status quo.

Weddings like these founded purely on tradition are simply bad, in my humble opinion. They’re not worth the time or money invested in them. Eliot Schrefer wrote “traditions are just peer pressure from dead people” and that’s true to a point. The fact is that tradition can be great. Every Sunday my family has tacos for lunch at the same fish taco restaurant, and every birthday date we make an effort to celebrate each other. But we as a global community have become so disconnected from the idea that a wedding is a very personal and intimate place where a couple gets to create their own traditions, that a wedding can be really good, that we as a society don’t really know how to make a good wedding.

So we just do the same old thing and we end up with a wedding without intent.

We keep doing the same old thing hoping for a different result.

So if you’d like to just get through this wedding thing without upsetting too many people, and blow thirty or fifty thousand dollars at the same time you’d be best served to put this book down and to pick up a copy of something Martha Stewart has published.

But if you’re prepared to throw out the script and create a moment in your life that is good and beautiful where you end the day as a married couple then let’s do this.