The Bumpy Road to Married Bliss

A New Tradition

Chris – 5 December 2011

London is our home – it’s where we’ve spent all our time together as a couple, and we’ve decided that it’s where we want to be married. Many of our London friends have had their weddings outside of London, and I totally understand why they would do that. There’s a lot more space and you can get a lot more for your money. But there’s something special about getting married where you live. It’ll be tricky, but we’ll make it work somehow.

The other challenge we are giving ourselves is that we want to organise and pay for everything ourselves, and not look to our families for financial help. We want this to be our day, and we want to host it. Our parents and families will be our honoured guests, but we don’t want them to feel like they have to help run anything.

So, what sort of wedding will this be? Technically, of course, this won’t be a wedding at all: it will be a ‘civil partnership ceremony’. However, Donny and I have decided to call it our ‘wedding’ and our ‘marriage’ in all the invites and whenever we talk about it. The word ‘marriage’ has a powerful resonance in our culture. We don’t see what we’re doing as being any different from a regular wedding, so why should we use different terminology?

Having said all that, over the years we have been to countless weddings, both gay and straight, where everything follows the set pattern of service, champagne, photos, food, speeches, dancing (in that order). Sometimes it seems that the bride and groom just have to turn up wearing the correct outfits – everything else is taken care of. I will admit there is something quite tempting about this – everyone involved knows what’s expected and it essentially means your day arrives as a kit with a few pre-arranged personalisations here and there. Even most of the gay weddings I’ve been to follow this pattern. And they’ve been great – don’t get me wrong – but surely a gay wedding gives you an opportunity to break the pattern? After all, while mixed-gender weddings have followed a similar format for a couple of hundred years, gay weddings are a new phenomenon. Can’t we create our own new traditions?

The fact that we are two men means we can’t get married in a church. Although many of my gay Christian friends have had civil ceremonies followed by a blessing in a church, that’s not what we want to do. Not only does Donny not share my faith, but I think there’s something important about having the actual legal joining as the key part of the whole day, with everyone watching. So many people over the years have campaigned for gay people to be able to have legal recognition of their partnerships, and we want to celebrate that by having it centre-stage on our day.

So, churches are out, but I also don’t want to get married in some drab room in a town hall. Right now, our idea is to find a large hall or venue where we can have the ceremony and reception all in one place. It’ll just make everything simpler, and we won’t have to transport everyone from venue to venue. There are a few possibilities in our part of London, so we’ll start exploring at the weekend.

Style-wise, we want it to include just enough standard wedding stuff so people feel comfortable, but enough imagination to actually make it memorable. But how far can you push it before a day goes from ‘imaginative and individual’ to being ‘just a bit weird’? After all, for many of our guests it will be crazy enough having two guys tying the knot, without us descending from the ceiling on abseil ropes (although that would be quite cool). But equally, we want enough personal content for our wedding so that it feels like OUR day, and that it couldn’t have been anyone else’s. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Above all, we want the wedding to be a classy affair, but we also want it to feel relaxed, so that everyone can feel welcome and at ease – like an amazing dinner party, just with a hundred or so of our closest friends.

And we’ll release a flock of white doves – obviously.

No Child Left Behind

Donny – 7 December 2011

We all have preconceived notions about weddings. They are one of the few events in life that are nearly universal – whether you grew up in Mongolia, Australia or Brazil … you will have been to a wedding. And there will be common elements to most weddings, since Western cultural traditions are so pervasive. If you’ve watched Four Weddings and a Funeral, you will have seen the archetypical silver-screen weddings (and also what can go wrong at them!).

As Chris and I started thinking about ideas for our own wedding, we went through every single one we had been to as a couple to identify elements that we liked, and elements that we didn’t like. And we also had a think about any particularly memorable weddings that we had been to individually in the past to see if there were any ideas we could use.

What became clear to us was that neither of us wanted to blindly follow any traditions and it was important for us to have a wedding that reflected our own sense of style. Also, because we weren’t involving any family members in the planning, we didn’t need to cater to any other stakeholders (which happens far too often in most weddings, especially if parents are helping to pay for it). So we could do whatever we wanted – and this, of course, left us paralysed with indecision.

So which features have we liked about weddings we have been to? Open bar, good food, beautiful venue – all of these have been important parts of the more memorable weddings, although an open bar can be expensive and potentially messy. Some other nice weddings we have been to really reflected the personalities of the couple, like one wedding that was done on a tight budget, where the couple had ordered vegetarian curries from their favourite neighbourhood Indian restaurant and ice cream from their local dessert shop.

And some of the less fun weddings we’ve attended have had really long services (Catholic weddings in particular!) or have been too stuffy and formal – or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, have been disorganised, didn’t have seating arrangements, or included large numbers of children running amok.

With all this in mind, one of the biggest decisions we made was for our wedding to be a child-free event. At the end of the day, what we wanted to do was show our closest friends and family members a really good night out, and we figured that most of our friends who are parents would understand, and they might even look forward to having some child-free time so that they could let their hair down. Otherwise they would be stuck in parent mode, making sure the kids were fed and weren’t too tired or having an embarrassing meltdown.

But this also meant that Chris’s three adorable little nephews, two twins aged three and a five-year-old, wouldn’t be able to take part.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Chris – 8 December 2011

Very excitingly, tonight we’ve decided that once our relationship has legal recognition and support, we will finally have the stability and security to bring a new life into the world.

Before you get too excited, the new life we have in mind is the four-legged and furry variety – Donny and I are going to get a puppy!

You see, whatever shape our wedding ends up being, we’ve decided that it isn’t going to be a way for us to get more things for our flat. We are not a young couple starting out in life together. We’ve both lived full lives already and have all the possessions we need. We certainly don’t require new dinner plates or glassware.

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