On September 1, Peace Is Sexy went to a whole new level. Marianne, Peace Is Sexy founder, and Andreas, Peace Is Profitable contributor, were married in a chateau just outside of Paris, France. In the months ahead of the wedding and the few days since, we’ve heard all kinds of horror stories and drama that others have experienced (or are afraid to experience) around the planning of such a big event, but we are happy to say that we got hitched without a hitch. So we thought we’d share some of the wisdom we acquired that made the wedding and the whole planning process peaceful, fun and even sexy!
Rule #1: It has to be fun. (This was the only rule we had.) For us, it was really important that our wedding and accompanying preparations be fun for us, for our families, for our friends, even for our suppliers. And we agreed that if it wasn’t fun, we weren’t going to do it. This turned out to be a great guideline in more aspects than we even realized. When we were creating our guest list, all the people that were in the gray area of potential invitees, the deciding factor for whether or not they got an invitation was how much fun they would bring to our party. We both agreed that neither sit-down dinners nor creating seating charts were much fun, so we scrapped that and had everything cocktail- and buffet-style so people could mingle and sit where they wanted. The few times we forgot to take that rule into account are where we got into trouble. For example, we asked a couple to do some grocery shopping because we thought it would be easy for them. Turns out that they did not think that was a fun task at all, so we got some resistance. But when we found someone who loves grocery shopping to help them out, everyone had a good time!
Otherwise, we had a few guiding principles from our relationship that were tremendously helpful during the whole wedding planning process: trust and open communication. Our level of trust in each other reached a new level. We found that for tasks that we didn’t think were fun, but were important, there was someone we knew who thought it was fun and was willing to do it. The key was to find the right person and to trust them to do it. We were also fortunate to have the help of a great wedding planner who we fully trusted. And trust was a lot easier with open communication. Even when we were having difficult conversations around budgets and finances, open communication with each other, with our families and with our wedding planner took away all the frustration and anxiety.
Trust and open communication helped us with a great tip that our recently married friends gave us. They warned us that some parts of the wedding would be really important to us and since it was our wedding we should not compromise on that. But other aspects that we didn’t particularly care about were going to become paramount for someone in the family. When we came across those things, we should decide how important they were to us. Things that weren’t important to us we should just grant them to the family member and let them take ownership of it. This was a good way of having our families participate in the things they were most interested in.
The way this worked out for our ceremony was that we decided that it was really important for us to blend our two religious backgrounds, Judaism and Catholicism. As we did some research, we decided that it would be easiest for us to write our own ceremony. So we went through Jewish and Catholic wedding ceremonies and pulled out the aspects that had the most meaning for us, and modified others. We then asked our families for their input within the framework we’d established. This way we were able to create a meaningful ceremony for ourselves, our families and our friends.