I don’t care what anybody says over at the Hallmark Greeting Card Company, love is difficult. The prospect of spending your life with someone is even more so. One minute you’re down on your knees, staring into the eye of your lover, the next you’re sending out invites, picking out venues, and cheating on each other. A lot.
When my fiancée and I both independently paid private investigators to go and photograph each other having sex with our co-workers in seedy motel rooms, we knew we had a problem — a problem that could only be solved by a bigger wedding that was more expensive to have, more inconvenient to get to, and more of an obligation for everyone involved. A wedding with purpose. A wedding with a destination.
A lot of our fake friends said Sarah and I should call the whole thing off. Fat chance. We don’t take commitment lightly. Marriage is a life sentence, or it’s nothing at all. And to those doubters and cynics, maybe once you see us standing there on that beach in Aruba, you’ll feel just a little bit silly. And maybe, a bit more love.
Now, don’t get me wrong, planning a wedding is no easy task, and a destination wedding is even harder. Originally, we had some conflicts about where we’d go for the wedding. Sarah wanted to go to Hawaii. I wanted to go to France. It led to many, many hours of screaming matches. But in the end, we managed to settle on a destination neither of us really liked, so no one got hurt. Ultimately, we’re just lucky we were able to get our parents to pay for the whole thing, so no one stayed hurt.
A destination wedding is also great, because it separates the chaff from the wheat in terms of who our real friends are and what they’re willing to spend on us. In addition to the travel and hotel fees, our registry is very important to us. It will not be acceptable to show up to this wedding without a gift. Otherwise, we’ll have nothing for our lawyers to squabble over in four years.
So laugh on, you cynics. Laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh. But when you’re standing on that white, sandy beach in Aruba, watching me and my lady love enjoy our first dance together to the sounds of “Home” by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, you won’t think about the infidelity or the credit card debt you had to go into to be there. You’ll be thinking of love.
