Our Shotgun Wedding – And the Reasons We Recommend It
Our decision to move abroad came with an incredible caveat: get married. In order for both of us to enjoy the same benefits and to make the move easier, we had to be married. So, we planned a wedding in three weeks. We don’t want to go too much into the excitement, romance, and fantasy that goes into a shotgun wedding (that’ll be reserved for a later post), but we want to make an argument for the enormous upgrade that comes with one.
Before we were presented with this ultimatum, we were going to have a fairly humble but large and well thought out wedding. Not that we’d made any concrete plans but after 5 years together, that was the assumption. This is just what people do when they have good paying jobs and a lot of friends and family. We were ready to go the whole 9 yards, pick “the perfect” venue, choose the flower arrangements, the color palate, practice our first dance, and every other minute detail a wedding planner will tell you about. Luckily for us, career paths and forces of nature made it obvious that an American style wedding was just more stressful than it’s worth.
Our shotgun wedding opened our eyes to the beauty of simplicity and spontaneity. With 3 weeks to plan the wedding, we didn’t have the luxury of finding an established venue. This little factoid brought out what is probably the hidden treasure of shotgun weddings, the solicited and unsolicited help from friends and family. The gazebo on the river was a suggestion from a friend, and everything seemed to fall into place afterwards. Plus our incredible friends and family ended up helping with the decorations, photography, live music, and even the food and champagne.
We’ve watched our friends stress out over the course of a year, and even longer, trying to get all of the details of their wedding right. The venue, the rehearsal dinner, the after party, the food, the open bar, the photos, and the list goes on. Maybe some people like that and the truth is, if you are going to have a wedding with a year to plan, then the expectations are that it must be great.
However, if you’re not royalty, our recommendation is: get engaged and then tie the knot in 2 months. That gives people enough time to make plans and you enough time to make sure all of the important details are taken care of. For example, we were recommended an incredible photographer, but didn’t really think much about the list of photos we wanted and missed a few important ones that would have meant a lot to some family and friends. We also planned the day out fairly well, but having an extra week would have gone a long way with finalizing the smaller details.
Yes, there were some small oversights, but the day was pretty close to perfect. The initial plan was to have a small courthouse wedding, but once the family from Venezuela said they could make it, plans quickly changed. It turned out to be a day filled with 70 of our closest friends and family. We were lucky and the weather was stunning, there was a full moon and high tide, which almost made the gazebo sink, but we were out of there just in time. We may have run out of food, but we had the dance party we always wanted. We had an after party at a cool Irish pub (not planned, but they gladly welcomed us), and even stopped by a Latin bar just the two of us for a bit of reggaeton before ending the night.
We understand there is a lot of pressure to have a wedding just as extravagant as your closest friends and we did have the convenient excuse of moving across the globe. However, multiple people at our wedding did say “this is how we should have done our wedding”. There is just too much stress with a conventional wedding and so many interested parties trying to make money off of it. If you’re wildly rich maybe that isn’t such a big deal, but the stress should be.
Instead of focusing so much time and energy on making sure everything goes perfectly and in ensuring this is “the happiest day of your life”, spend more time focusing on the rest of your days being the happiest of your life.
