What Is a Wedding, Anyway?

I hear it a lot.

"A wedding is too expensive."

"I don't want the white dress and the tux."

"I am just going to elope."

And this is a good opportunity for me to explain Be Sweet's philosophy about weddings: There are only really three things needed to have a wedding - a couple, an officiant, and a marriage license.

Seriously. So that elopement? Still a wedding. That white dress? Not necessary. Expense? Again, not necessary.

At the end of the day, a wedding is where you get married. End of story. All the embellishments (which yeah, I know, are kind of my job and so I may be actually losing customers by saying this) are just that - gilding the lily, so to speak. Don't want the white dress? Don't have to have it. Don't want to spend a lot of money? Don't need to. Some of the most fun weddings I've been to involve maybe 20 people, a quick dash to a city park for vows and then a pub crawl. Minimal expense, massive fun.

In fact, when the Mister and I got hitched, we decided early on that we weren't the type to be comfortable with an entire day focused on us. So our focus became throwing an awesome party - where we just happened to get married.

Once you begin to think about weddings as having only three absolutes, the rest becomes easy. The other stuff is literally whatever you want it to be, including a quick ceremony followed by a rousing game of beer pong.