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When Adam and I first met, I discovered that my date absolutely LOVED pizza. So, for our fourth date, I made us pizza for dinner after a rousing two rounds of mini golf (I lost both times).
Shortly after, Adam discovered how much I loved brunch and took me to his favorite breakfast café—where we still go back time and again.
And so, our first inside joke began: He loves pizza, I love brunch.
As we learned more about each other, my adventurous foodie spirit and recent move out of NYC led me to joke that I was going to start a blog devoted to my love of brunch and his love of pizza. In my dreams, the blog would be all about exploring my new life in southwest Florida with my partner where we try new pizza and brunch places every week.
Unfortunately, that blog never materialized and trying two new restaurants a week turned out to be unsustainable. But that adventurous foodie spirit won out and we did get to and still continue to try new pizza and brunch restaurants when we can. (Well, and other things on occasion too, of course…)
Earlier this year, Adam and I began to plan our wedding long before we became officially engaged. We talked about what we wanted (a small wedding), where we wanted it (in Chicago where Adam is from) and what we wanted to do for it. After announcing our plans to marry to close friends and family (and eventually on Facebook), we started to make the plans… or not.
Because we had already decided that we wanted a small, casual wedding, I didn’t initially feel pressured to begin the “wedding planning” process. The most I did was occasionally look at pretty dresses online and listen to the Bridechilla podcast.
Sometime over the summer, I was in a DSW and found an adorable pair of shoes that I instantly decided were the shoes I wanted to wear on my wedding day. Shortly after, I had a gift card to TJMaxx and bought some lingerie. After that, Adam and I gathered the emails of everyone who we planned to invite to our wedding (we had the guest list planned before we “announced” our engagement) and I sent out our Save-the-Date emails. Since our wedding will be small, hopefully cheap and we want to make it environmentally conscious, we didn’t really feel the need to do things like take engagement photos or send out paper Save-the-Dates.
I even went so far as to buy my wedding dress (off the rack and it fits *perfectly*) over the summer and most recently got a pretty headband because I figured out how I want to do my hair.
All in all, though, wedding planning has been pretty quiet. To be honest, our summer was mostly filled with other things—such as planning for our dream European vacation that I am calling our “engagement moon.” Because our wedding was so far away, there just wasn’t much to do.
And now… We’re just over six months out and I feel like I haven’t done a thing.
But I am determined not to be one of those people who spends the next six months talking only about my wedding and obsessing over it. I don’t want to be a bride who loses weight due to stress (in fact, I am perfectly happy with my weight as it is) and I don’t want to end up fighting with my fiancé because all we do is wedding planning. I refuse to be one of those people, period.
So when we got back from Europe a couple weeks ago, I knew that I wanted to start wedding planning—but where to start?
Being one of those stubborn people that believes that our wedding should be ours and ours alone to decide, I went back to the beginning of what we loved: pizza and brunch.
From the very beginning, we both knew that we wanted to do something at his family’s favorite pizza place, Lou Malnati’s. So that was fairly easy. Then one evening, I thought: “What if we also do brunch?!” and it all clicked into place.
Once I told my idea to Adam, he completely agreed that it seemed very “us” to include these two things that we both love, that we loved individually before we met and now love as a couple, in our wedding.
Although we still haven’t booked anything, I feel good that we came to a mutual decision about what we truly wanted to do at our wedding. And although there might be some people who may not be as into the idea, it is very special to us.
Though I admit: I still had a few doubts about our decision to do a “pizza and brunch” wedding, so I joined some Facebook communities for brides and posted about our plans there. Quickly, I received responses from many who said that our wedding plans sound lovely… And, okay, maybe I shouldn’t need someone else to tell me what I already know, but that’s just my anxiety talking.
The point of this is that I am so proud that Adam and I are able to talk about, and agree upon, what we want for our special day. We also constantly acknowledge that this will be just one day in the rest of our lives together and, although we want it to be “special”, it also won’t be the Best Day Ever.
Instead, it will be a lovely day where we are hopefully surrounded by all of the people we truly care about… all while eating some pizza and brunch, of course.
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