So you are engaged and ready to plan your wedding. Maybe you’ve always been interested in keeping things small and intimate, or you’ve just recently heard about the increasingly popular wedding trend: micro weddings. Regardless of what has drawn you to learn more about having a micro wedding, chances are you are reading this because wedding planning is stressing you out and you are probably being bombarded with at least a hundred questions a day from your friends and family. Welcome to the stress of having a wedding.
What started as an exciting feeling of getting married has now turned into a never-ending list of things to do and you don’t know where to start. First and foremost, you need to understand what a micro wedding is and what it is not. A micro wedding is any wedding that is fifty guests or less. It is not, necessarily a cheap wedding. A micro wedding has five main major benefits when it comes to planning your wedding:
- You can focus on what’s important
- You can personalize your wedding
- You can save money
- You can help the environment
- You don’t have to wait and have a long engagement
Micro weddings are not what you think. They are not a way to have a cheap and small wedding. Micro weddings are all about creating a meaningful and gorgeous wedding that reflect your two personalities with a guest count of fifty people or less.
What does this have to with your relationship? How can having a smaller and more meaningful micro wedding create a healthier relationship? The answer is in the question. A more meaningful start to your marriage starts with the wedding planning process.
Weddings are one of the most stressful rites of passage in one’s life along with buying a house and having a baby. Why not have a more meaningful wedding with just the people that will be around for a while to hold you and your spouse accountable for the vows you make that day? In any given week are you really talking to fifty or more people that truly care about you? The average person usually has a group of ten to fifteen friends that they speak to regularly. Having additional people at your wedding is more about pleasing parents, family, friends, or colleagues. Having the people that love you the most at your wedding is what is most important. Your wedding is about your two families coming together and not necessarily about throwing a big fancy party for a bunch of people that you hardly talk to. If having an intimate and meaningful relationship is what you are seeking for your marriage, shouldn’t your wedding day reflect that?
Personalization of weddings came about around the turn the of the century with the onset of digital photography and the internet making it possible for everyone to see interesting and personalized ideas for their wedding day. Getting inspired by the internet has a huge hand to play in how creative weddings have become over the past twenty years and the onset of social media. When your wedding is smaller, you will have more room in your budget to really personalize your wedding day. If you have always dreamed of having gorgeous flowers and a gorgeous escort card display with a sushi bar for cocktail hour, the less people you have, the closer you can get to having your dreams come true. When you only have twenty guests, you can personalize each person’s experience for your wedding day and therefore creating deeper relationships with the people that surround you that day. Spending time with twenty to fifty people is much easier than trying to spend quality time with one hundred fifty people in a five-hour time span. Imagine how much more fun wedding planning will be with your fiancé if you are enjoying planning fun surprises for each guest. You will get to share stories about your friends and learn more about each other in the process of wedding planning.
Saving money tends to be a big draw for a micro wedding. However, don’t read “saving money” as a call sign for being cheap. Almost every wedding that is fifty guests or more tends to spend over fifty to sixty percent of their budget on food and beverage. Typically, with micro weddings you end up spending a little less of your overall budget on food and beverage as there are simply less guests to feed. This will free up your budget to spend money on other things that you might be really excited about it. Maybe instead of having a DJ, you can afford that band you wanted. Getting excited about your wedding day and all the details can do wonders for your relationship while you dream about the big day together!
Helping the environment is something that many engaged couples worry about when it comes to planning their wedding day. With less people there will be less waste. You can also really think through the details of your wedding from an environmental perspective when you have less guests to think about. You can ask the right questions of your vendors. For example, does your caterer compost at all or do they recycle at the bar and in the kitchen? Who knows, your wedding might spark your vendors to be more eco-conscious and you can tell your guests all about it. Buying local and using local vendors to create everything for your big day will also set you and your fiancé up for a better sustainable lifestyle after the wedding is over. A better environment and sustainable living can really lead to a healthier relationship and lifestyle overall.
Finally, one way to help your relationship the most is to not drag out your engagement. With a smaller guest count, it is usually much easier to plan your wedding and you don’t need to wait a year or two to actually get married.
Your relationship is the most important thing in your life right now and your wedding should be a fun and natural extension of that. If having a larger wedding is pulling you in a ton of different directions and causing an enormous amount of stress, maybe going smaller with a micro wedding is the best thing for you and your fiancé. Focusing on what matters most in your relationship will help guide you throughout the wedding planning process. Cheers to the two of you for exploring options that will last past the wedding day!
For more on micro weddings, see Katie Martin’s book The Everything Guide to Micro Weddings, available from Amazon or Bookshop.
