Wedding party, and other important people

Before my crazed Engagement Fever began, Mike and I would occasionally talk about what our wedding might be like. I don’t think anything very concrete came out of these talks, except for what our wedding party would look like.

It was all very logical to him. He is close to his brother, so of course he would be his best man. And he only had 4 close guy friends, so of course they would also be standing with him. (Shout out to Chris, Jim, Anthony and Larry!)

But here’s where I got huffy: they would not just be standing with him as groomsmen, they would all 5 be his best men.  I argued with him briefly, but dropped it because these were talks about a wedding that wouldn’t be happening for years at the time, and we weren’t even close to engaged.

So here we are, actually engaged and planning a wedding.  I know he hadn’t changed his mind about his 5 best men.  But he also has all these new good guy friends from the job he started in August. So he has more than just the 4 now- I figured- why can’t he downsize his side? Or convert them into regular groomsmen?

Well he wasn’t budging. And I was struggling coming up with 5 ladies to be on my side - I could easily think of 4 (friend Cara, sister Cara, sister Becky and future sister-in-law Stephanie), but that 5^th lady was and is still a mystery in my head.

And if we were going to have an intimate shindig (which we are)- how weird would that look? Half the wedding would be standing up there with us!

Well, thankfully, Mike and I came to a decision.  If we were going to have a huge wedding, or even a moderately sized one, then of course we’d have these special folks standing up with us.

But we aren’t.  And when it comes down to it, the friends we mention in our never-to-be wedding party are the only friends being invited to our intimate wedding. They are marked as special regardless.

So we decided to have no attendants. Not one on either side.  Given our small venue and wedding size, I think it makes a lot of sense.

One of the ideas being thrown around as far as ceremony seating is to not have any seating (except for those who shouldn’t stand for 10-15 minutes).  So in essence, everyone in the wedding would be standing with us.  I love this idea for logistical reasons (we won’t need all that many ceremony chairs) and for the symbolic reasons - this sort of makes the entire wedding our wedding party.  I love it! Especially since we want to have our dinner seating such that we are all sitting at one big (head?) table.

Oh, and I can’t forget the other person who will be standing with us- and marrying us- our officiate. Now, even if we didn’t ask her to be our officiate, she would have been at our wedding as a guest. I’m talking about Kim, wife of our good friend Chris, and current seminary student. Mike and I aren't really church-going people, but we didn’t want a stranger marrying us.  We wanted someone special- so Kim is perfect. We’re really excited she said yes when we asked her to marry us!