I proposed to David on Christmas Day, 2014, high in the Caucasus mountains straddling the Russian-Georgian border, next to a fourteenth century church. There were no other people around, but for our chain-smoking driver who had happened to pick us up on one his routines jaunts between Vladikavkaz, the capital of the Russian state of North Ossetia, and Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. These types of crazy adventures have come to define a large part of our relationship, and so it seemed like the perfect place to take the figurative next step in our relationship.
But we are not having a wedding. Not in the traditional sense at least. We racked our brains as to how we should celebrate our marriage, and both came up with the answer that the best way to do so would be to not get all gussied up and rent out an event space for a bunch of people somehow tangentially related to us – but to go on another adventure. We see so many of our peers killing themselves deciding between travel or wedding, travel or wedding, travel or wedding. To us, the choice was incredibly simple.
Weddings today are big business, and while we think it’s great that some people go down the traditional route – with the wedding parties, and table settings, and videographers, etc. etc. etc. – it just isn’t us. We are of modest means, and trying to save for a potential future where I won’t be a corporate wage slave and he’ll be able to run his own enterprise. And to us, the traditional wedding price tag left us with sticker shock.
I’ve read in different places about the cost of the average American wedding hovers at around $30,000 today. I think about $30,000, and think about a down payment on a house, saving for retirement, hell a year spent on the road around the world – but certainly not a wedding.
This might sound odd, as I am a person who will happily spend $10,000 a year on various travels for the rest of my life, but not that same amount (or really, a small fraction thereof) on a day to commemorate my wedding. I am all about paying for experiences, but don’t feel the need to pay lip service to the fanfare around what society has deemed a wedding to be.
Weddings, to me, have become this strange cultural phenomenon that seem almost inescapable. And I do consider myself lucky that, as a gay man, I am not held to the same ridiculous wedding tropes that apply to straight couples – especially those applying to women. I do feel that weddings are a cultural leftover of a time when men felt the need to enforce some aspect of control over women in their lives (whether that woman is a daughter or a wife), and that lots of the folksy traditions that make up the foundation of a wedding (dad giving away the daughter, etc.) are anachronistic leftovers of a time when women were possessions. Needless to say, I believe women have a harder time navigating the cultural norms around weddings and marriage, and that often times it’s easier to just buy in to the hoopla around weddings than to fight against them.
I think it also helps having grown up never thinking marriage was going to be an option for me. I never fantasized about a traditional wedding because it was out of my realm of imagination. And while this may have stoked desire for some in my community, for me it enabled me to write it off altogether. So when it became legal for gays and lesbians to marry in Washington State in 2012, I didn’t immediately start planning my hypothetical wedding. Instead, I recognized the importance of the change in laws, and went on my merry way.
And so when David and I decided to get married, we chose to eschew the typical wedding conventions in favor of something that felt more like us. So far this has meant no registry, no fancy printed invitations, no wedding party, and certainly no tuxes. Instead, to celebrate our union, we’ve gotten matching tattoos that celebrate our love for one another as well as our love for travel, invested a ton of money into landscaping our backyard (and, in all transparency, with a LOT of financial help from my parents), and rubber cemented invitations on the backs of old postcards we have purchased along various travels we’ve taken together.
So our wedding celebration? We had about fifty people over to our house for a backyard party – not for the wedding ceremony, that happened two weeks ago, with just my family and David’s oldest friend. There were no bridesmaid dresses, no speeches, no DJ. Our big splurge was hiring the quesadilla people from the farmer’s market to come make food for everyone (at $8 a head). And we were privileged enough to be largely funded by my parents for the big day, the total cost for the event wasn’t anywhere close to what most people pay for their wedding venue alone.
The best part about the whole thing is having friends and family who know us well enough to know that a traditional wedding wouldn’t be our style in the first place. They understand that our speed is more jeans and t-shirts, maybe with some rescue dogs thrown in – not so much readings from Corinthians, Vera Wang, and the chicken dance.
The week after is our real splurge – you’ve probably read about it here already – a week and a half in the Baltics and a week in Malta. One week of exploration travel in the former Soviet bloc, and one week to run trails and sun our buns on the remote Mediterranean island of Gozo in Malta. To be completely transparent, our honeymoon, when all is said and done, will cost us around $8,000. And I will be the first person to acknowledge how truly privileged I am to spend such a sum on a two and a half week trip. But I have to say, I can’t imagine the memories there won’t be worth more than a day of stress in stuffy clothes with a bunch of relatives I don’t really care for in the first place.
