So, my girlfriend and I have now been together for four years. Our relationship, so far, has taken us to three different continents (we met as students in France, lived in Taiwan for two years, and spent four months with my family in the US), and we’re ready to settle down, have a place that we call ours, and not be ready always to pack our stuff into a couple suitcases and move somewhere else.
We’re getting married, and I’m stoked. One of the reasons it took so long is that I wanted to make sure both of our families were okay with it, and it wasn’t until three years after we started dating that we actually made it back to the US together for her to meet most of my family and friends.
Now, the ball’s rolling, and our families are behind us.
As you can probably guess, if someone wants stability, it’s probably because they’re ready to stop living like two broke students. Which is to say, we don’t have much money (and I’m [hopefully] about to start graduate school!), and I don’t want my parents to pay for the wedding, so we have to make as much of this stuff DIY as we can.
Here’s where we stand right now (we’re still trying to fight our way through the bureaucratic shitstorm that awaits us with visas and whatnot):
[ul]
[li]We will have a big family dinner here, which requires very little planning. It’s pretty standard stuff.[/li][li]Once we finally make it back to the US, we intend to have a big “wedding” (even though we’ll already technically be married) in which we say our vows and have a party. [/li][/ul]
It’s that last part that I want suggestions for.
First, there’s one aspect that I’m both worried and excited about: her family wants to come. That’s great because they’ve been so welcoming to me here in Taiwan that I would like to do the same for them in the US. That’s worrisome because her parents don’t speak a lick of English, only Chinese and Taiwanese. We have some Taiwanese friends that plan on coming, and my girlfriend’s brother also wants to come. They’ve all offered to help take care of her parents, and, of course, translate any conversations that need to be translated.
I’m more excited about this than I am worried. I’ve been amazed and uplifted to see how our relationship has changed both of our families, and I think our wedding could be a chance to continue that. We both come from families where travel and living abroad are not the norm. I was really touched to see my parents open up and almost gain a childlike curiosity when my girlfriend was in the US with me. We would sit at dinner and my parents would just as question after question about life in Taiwan.
**Anyone have any suggestions about how we could integrate this into the wedding itself? While I don’t think we’ll have any problems, I do think we’ll sort of need to break the ice. Have something that both the Mandarin speakers and the English speakers can understand?
**
I should go into more depth about the wedding too. I’m thinking that it will be out in the country, where I live, on the South Carolina coast. I think we’ll have a very informal, quick ceremony where we say our vows, then have a party. No tuxes, no servers, and all that mess. There’ll be an open bar, but people can serve themselves. We don’t need to hire someone to get people’s drinks. I want to have music, but I don’t want to hire a band. I’d love to just have friends bring instruments, and we play all night like we used to, but I don’t have enough friends who play instruments (other than guitar), so I don’t know how to work that out.
In some way, in all of this, I’d like to do something that introduces my girlfriend to everyone. Though we did spend four months at home, we were quite busy, as were many of my best friends, so we rarely got to meet up and talk. I’d like to do something, have something there, that would start conversations about my girlfriend, let her introduce herself. One of things I was thinking is that, since she loves to paint, we could put her paintings around, hang them from trees, with lights on them. Something like that, so that people could see all that she’s done.
Finally, in the most general terms, **anyone who has creative marriage ideas that are different from what most people normally do and not strange enough to freak out my grandmother (who is the archetypal Southern Lady), please feel free to give me suggestions. **I really want this wedding to be more participatory, interesting, and, most of all, a way to welcome my girlfriend to the US for our new life here together.
That’s all I can think of right off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll think of more questions as we go along.