You can read previous posts abot my love story at the following links : Introduction ; Part 1 – How We Met ; Part 2 – Getting To Know One Another ; Part 3 - Engaged ; Part 4 - Planning the wedding.
The ring was on my finger, and the wedding was planned for late June. It was set....we would be husband and wife in just a few short months.....or so we thought. What if I told you that even though we planned and paid for a June wedding, we actually got married in March. Uh huh.....stay with me here, because people don't really understand this part of my story. In March of 2009, our pastor married us at our church with only our parents present, but we still had our planned wedding in late June. Even now, people often wonder why on earth we had two weddings. I don't expect people to understand our reasoning. All that really matters is that it makes sense to us. Keep reading, and maybe it will make a little more sense to you too.
From the moment Matt and I began discussing marriage, we seriously considered eloping. The biggest problem Matt had with eloping was that we would not be sharing that special moment with our families (our parents particularly). I also had a few concerns about eloping. The first concern was getting married in the middle of the school year. I tried to keep my personal life out of the classroom (this was at times difficult due the fact that most of my students went to the same church as me). The idea of leaving on a Friday with one last name and returning on a Monday with a different last name seemed rather awkward to me. Let's just say it was something that I really didn't want to have to deal with. I couldn't imagine my students asking me how my weekend was, and me replying, "Oh, it was wonderful....I got married". Are you with me....does no one else find that a little awkward? Another concern I had with eloping was the potential thoughts that our church family and/or parents of my students would think when they found out we eloped. Remember, my world is very conservative, and sadly I knew that it was not unlikely that some would think we "had" to get married (ie: pregnancy). That couldn't be any farther from the truth, but the idea of people thinking it made me rethink my desire to elope. While I had some concerns with eloping, I saw a lot of good in it. Number one, we would save money!!! Weddings are expensive, and even though Matt and I did all we could to keep the wedding cost down, we still ended up spending a lot of money on our wedding. Number two, eloping would just be the two of us!!! That was the main reason I wanted to elope. While there is something great about sharing that special moment with friends and family, I was taken with the idea of making the moment that we committed ourselves to one another a private and intimate moment. I really didn't want to worry about how my dress looked or how many people were watching us say "I do". I just wanted that moment to be about us and not a big wedding going on around us. Regardless of what we thought about eloping, we obviously put the idea in the back of our minds, because we planned on a beautiful garden wedding for the upcoming summer.
The idea of eloping didn't really come up again until late February. It was around that time that we were figuring out the details of our upcoming living situation once we were husband and wife. Naturally, I would move into his house, since he was a home owner and I was a renter. When I went to talk to my landlord about moving out, I was presented with three possibilities. Number one, I could break my lease in June and pay $1,500. Number two, I could pay my monthly rent until my lease was up in September even though I was moving out in June. This didn't sound like a good idea, since my rent was $700 a month, and I had utilities. The third option was to let a potential renter have my apartment, but there were circumstances that had to occur in order for us to take that option: there couldn't be any other apartments available at the time someone wanted my apartment, and the renter had to be ready to move into the apartment right away. The third option sounded great, because we wouldn't have to pay $1,500 to get out the apartment. However, we planned on the first option, because what were the odds of someone wanting my apartment right when I was needing to get out?
Well, things got even more complicated on a late February day when I was told that someone did want my apartment......but they needed to move in April, 1. What were we to do with that information? We needed to make a decision quick. On the one hand, we had already planned and paid for a June wedding......we couldn't just cancel it, and moving up the wedding date wasn't and option. On the other hand, we could save $1,500 if I was out of my apartment by April 1....not to mention, we would save four months rent and utilities. We began to think that there might be a happy medium to our predicament. What if we had a small intimate ceremony at our church with our parents before April 1, and we renewed our vows at the planned ceremony in June! In other words, we would have two weddings! One would be private and intimate (just the way I wanted it), and the other would be a celebration with friends and family (just the way Matt wanted it). This idea was sounding more appealing each time we discussed it, and not just because it got us out of our predicament, but because there was something romantic and exciting about the whole idea.
We went to our pastor with our news, and he agreed to marry us on March 20, as long as we completed all of our marriage counseling. That only gave us one month to make some big adjustments to our wedding plans! Even though we wanted our parents at the March wedding, we didn't want to tell anyone else about the new wedding plans (with the exception of close family) until we were actually wed. After all, if our parents didn't quite understand the idea of two weddings, we knew that others wouldn't understand either, and we didn't want to be talked out of our plans. Plus, there was just something exciting about keeping it to ourselves!
When the wedding day arrived I was a calm and collective bride. I went to work like any other Friday, but when I got home I slipped on a white evening gown and prepared myself for my groom. On
Even though most of our families knew we had just gotten married, I was still hesitant to tell my students and church family the news for reasons previously listed. It didn't really matter though, because one of my former students was in the church building the night we got married. By the time I arrived to work on Monday, everyone already knew my big news ;)
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