What makes a wedding Epic?
Epic is a feeling that you AND your guests get toward the end of the event that imprints on your minds a sense of hope, love, joy, connectedness, and awe. It grew out of this incredibly special experience you all had together. It bonds you to one another forever in a way we don’t experience nearly enough in life, and because of its rarity, it keeps people talking about the experience for decades to come.
It has nothing to do with how solemn the vows are or how flashy the centerpieces are, and everything to do with how comfortable everyone is in the experience - how comfortable they are being around YOU. So when the magazines tell you to customize your wedding in your own way, we agree, but that doesn’t mean you use your wedding to present yourselves to impress. It means you look at who the two of you REALLY are, and you build an experience around the very thing that connects you to your guests.
Does money help? Absolutely. The ideal wedding provides an experience that is just comfortable enough to allow guests to relax, just impressive enough to invoke some awe (and let them know they’re in for an interesting evening), and just YOU enough that they know what the energy will be. Money helps with the awe part and the comfort part. If your beautiful park setting doesn’t have restrooms, money lets you rent some. The nicer the restrooms you rent, the more comfortable your guests will be. Money lets you buy an amazingly delicious meal for your guests, rather than leaving them a bit disappointed and a bit hungry, but money isn’t everything. There are ways around money if you have the time and the creative/admin skills to do a lot yourself.
Does time help? Absolutely. If you were asked to throw a dinner party in 3 weeks on top of your currently already busy life, it would most likely stress you out. You would spend the 48 hours before the party rushing and panicking and asking yourself why you ever volunteered to do this. (Super type A’s, we know, we know, we’re not talking to you). Time allows you to really think through each of the thousands of possible rituals you might use to make your wedding extra meaningful and fun. You’ll have time to seek out the very best deals in your area for each service, at a quality level you feel confident in.
What else helps? A knowledge of what service levels each vendor provides (so you know you’re getting what you need / what you’re paying for), enough group psychology to keep the flow going for guests so they don’t get bored or anxious (so you keep the mood from dropping), an understanding of basic design concepts like scale, balance, and texture (so you nail the vignettes you’re designing and don’t have that half-assed feeling in the end), and someone to keep you sane since weddings can bring out the crazy in people.
Finally, it helps to have a healthy relationship with rituals because rituals are baked into every single thing about your wedding. Even having a wedding to begin with is a ritual. Wearing a white dress is a ritual, and walking down an aisle is a ritual. When you understand the role of ritual in your event and use it wisely, you avoid a lot of the “aren’t I supposed to…?” moments during planning and still come out with a very, very special event.
So yes, weddings are about the design and booking vendors and doing all the stuff that people do at their wedding, but these things are not the goal. If your wedding doesn’t bring people together in a way they need but don’t get enough of, then all the rituals in the world can’t make that wedding special in people’s hearts and memories. And THAT - a celebration of LOVE and HOPE and JOY - is what truly makes a wedding important.
Above all else, weddings are for people who want to see the world around them made a little bit brighter, a little less painful, and a little more hopeful, all while hitching themselves to their best friend in the world.
