Marriage is a commitment that we’re making, to each other, our community, and those who care about us, to stand by each other and repeatedly make choices which make our lives more enmeshed rather than less, like trees pruned to grow into each other.
We expect to continue to make choices that cause our lives to be fairly stressful and difficult, and want to commit to providing loyal support and close friendship to each other throughout whatever challenges face us.
Historically, marriage has often been the starting point of a relationship, a step that you take where you’re just becoming a self-reliant adult to start your own family. This doesn’t really feel like what’s happening here–we’ve been dating for more than eight years and living together for six; our marriage is a solidification of a relationship which has already lasted through a lot of joy, accomplishment, and growth, as well as various prolonged periods of substantial stress and pain. You might think of it as a bar mitzvah for the relationship–we’re celebrating its coming of age, and its transformation into something which we’re promising can be relied on.
Our wedding (as in, the specific event) means basically the normal thing that we think weddings mean to people. But we can try to spell out what we think it’s for anyway, and point to a few ways we look at it differently than some other people.
A ceremony is an opportunity to figure out exactly what we mean to commit to, and to articulate it to people in our lives, which makes it easier for each of us and them to hold us to it, support us in it, and rely on it themselves.
By attending our wedding ceremony and spending time together at the wedding as a whole, people in our lives have an opportunity to get a sense of each other (and therefore get a sense of parts of our lives that they’d normally not see much of). A marriage involves our relationship being more of a nexus of our social graph; it’s good to create opportunities for people in our lives to meet each other.
We love celebration and joy. We think parties are great, and
we rarely get a chance to party as much as we’d like to.
We think celebrations are particularly good when they’re
celebrating something in particular which inspires joy; our
marriage inspires joy in us and hopefully in you too (and if
not, maybe attending a fun party will help?). A lot of what we
want out of this wedding is that it’s an extremely fun
experience which generates a bunch of happy memories and
connections which we can rely on in the coming years.
The
main thing that we ask of attendees is that they lean into
this opportunity to celebrate. It’s more fun to party if
the people you’re partying with are committed to putting
in the emotional energy to have a good time and connect with
people. So if you’re the kind of person who only gets
around to properly partying a few times a year, we’d
appreciate it if you decided to make this one of those times.
We are proud of our relationship:
We're weird, and from a sparse part of the overall person-space cluster, but we found someone who we both really vibe with and are from a pragmatic perspective pretty lifestyle-compatible with.
We started dating pretty young, in our early twenties. We're proud of who we are, and we think dating the other was a meaningful part of becoming the people we are now. We think we push each other to be better and stronger people, and more live up to our values.
We love each other, find each other interesting, delightful, and admirable, and enjoy being together.
We spend a lot of our lives in professional contexts where it feels mildly inappropriate to refer to the fact that we’re dating, much less emphasize the extent to which we’re enmeshed in each other’s lives. We want to create a space where we don’t feel this way. This seems to us like a healthy step in adapting to a social presentation where we’re a married couple.