Here’s the thing. I believe that you get to expect the universe to give a shit about the fact that you’re getting married once. I expected the universe to give a shit about the fact that I was getting married the first time I did it, which was in 1999. Obviously, that didn’t work out and now we’re here, in 2011, where I got married for the second time (to the first most awesome guy ever). Ben, who had never been married before, could’ve expected the universe to give a shit about the fact that he was getting married but for real guys, he’s a dude and just isn’t that into weddings.
Aside from the fact that I’d already played my “give a shit about my wedding” card, we just really don’t give a shit about weddings. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t begrudge you a wedding if you want to have one and I don’t judge people for having weddings. But for us? We just don’t care. I mean, as they say on ESPN, come on, man. We’ve been together for almost 10 years. We have a child, a house, and 100 animals together. Getting married at this point isn’t the biggest deal in the world and honestly, it would feel a little ridiculous to make a huge event out of it.
There also are 9,000 things we’d rather spend money on than a wedding. As far as specific, wedding-related expenses go, our total was $60. That doesn’t count stuff like my dress, which I bought recently and wore for the first time here but can wear in other situations. You can’t really be mad at a $60 wedding. That’s kind of bad ass, if it’s okay for me to say that.
I realized early on that we had to be pretty bad ass about having a non-wedding wedding. Earlier this year, we thought about going to Vegas to get married. I got on Etsy and ordered this thing to wear in my hair when we went to Vegas and got married (it’s an aqua flower thing). That right there made me realize I was on a slippery slope to wedding spending madness. For a wedding in Vegas, even with just us, we’d end up spending a pretty good wad of cash. I mean, we’d probably want a photographer to document at least the wedding itself and well then a dress and some aqua shoes and we’d have to stay in a decent room at a decent hotel because gosh darn it it’s our special wedding blah blah and before you know it, thousands of dollars are gone.
I think weddings, like many situations in life, lend themselves to getting caught up in the 10,000 things. As stated in the Tao Te Ching:
The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
I know the Tao Te Ching has nothing to do with weddings, but I think the same reasoning applies, at least for me. If we invite one person to our wedding, we have to invite everybody. If we do one thing, we have to do a bunch of other things, too. We don’t want to do anything and therefore, we will do nothing. Zero times zero is zero.
I mean, we didn’t totally do nothing. We got dressed up (ish) in new clothes, packed up a bottle of champagne and crystal glasses and snacks for Soren, and headed out to City Park. (We originally planned to go to the Botanic Gardens, but I thought that would be awkward because there would probably be people walking by all the time.) We wanted to go to the gazebo but there were people in it so we went to the other side of the main building at City Park. The spot ended up being perfect — there was enough space for Soren to run around yelling at squirrels and we had a nice view of downtown. I got a few photos before the camera remote pretty much stopped working. And only two people walked through our wedding attempts. (There were several attempts.) We finally got through our vows with minimal toddler and squirrel interruptions, kissed, signed the marriage license, and finished the champagne.
We ended up being just as married as anybody who has ever had a wedding. That evening, Ben, Soren, and I went to City O City and had beer (well, Soren didn’t have beer), seitan wings, and seitan sausage and pepper pizza. I think the whole thing was pretty damn awesome.
This is my favorite video from the day — it’s one of the failed attempts.
Wedding: Take 4 from Tracy Noelle on Vimeo.