The Wedding Diaries: You Only Wed Twice

Ok, so before we move on to telling you all about our destination wedding we have to admit a little secret… although our wedding was definitely in La Palma as far as we are concerned, from a strictly legal standpoint the wedding had already taken place…in York.

The trouble with getting married abroad is that making it legally binding is really very difficult. In fact so difficult was it that we couldn’t actually make it happen in La Palma. So instead, the day before we flew out we had a very small civil ceremony with just our immediate family in attendance.

Now from what we understand this is a very common occurrence (in fact it’s also true of humanist ceremonies) but regardless feels a strange thing to have to do. As far as we were concerned it was not the wedding. It is however, undeniably a significant event, so just how big an event should it be? It’s a difficult call: make it too big and suddenly you’re having another wedding and the actual day may feel less significant. Make it too small and you may always regret not making a bigger thing of it. Achieving that perfect balance is extremely difficult and something that took us a long time to decide. In the end though I think we got it just right.

We decided that we would have a mini ceremony but not invite our friends, only family along with one or two very close family friends that were not going to be able to make it to the wedding abroad. It’s not that we wouldn’t have loved our friends to attend, but we felt (and I’m now sure we were right) that if everyone was there it would feel like the wedding. It might also mean people just came to the small ceremony and not the actual wedding which was the last thing we wanted! So it would be a tiny event and we would have a couple of readings to mark the occasion but we would not exchange rings. For me that decision not to give the rings was hugely important and I think when it came to it it was actually the moment I did finally place the ring on Dom’s finger that I did feel we were married. If we had already exchanged rings it would definitely not have had the same level of impact on me!

Apart from the rings though we basically followed the standard order of service. We arrived separately at the registry office dressed for the occasion, Dom surprising me by turning up in a completely different (and really beautiful) wedding dress for the occasion (high-street purchased and significantly cheaper than a normal wedding dress I am assured!)

We completed a lovely but quite brief ceremony with readings from two family members and had our photographs made all the more special as they were taken by someone very close to us: the other half of York Place Studios, my new brother-in-law Liam! We had always wanted photos by Liam but didn’t want him to feel like he was working on our wedding day so this provided the perfect opportunity to just take the odd snap without the pressure of the full-blown wedding day for which we hired another fantastic photographer. After the ceremony and one or two group shots in the garden we went off for a little shoot with Liam and the pictures are looking fantastic! (We’ll be sharing them very soon!)

We didn’t want to have a full blown reception as that would feel too weddingy, but just going home and packing also felt like an odd thing to do so, to mark the occasion, we headed off to one of our favourite restaurants (and in fact the sister restaurant to the one in which I proposed) The Tanglewood where we enjoyed a few drinks and a nice meal in a private room which the Tanglewood had been kind enough to provide us. This wasn’t a reception as such but was a lovely meal with both families and marked the occasion in just the right way.

All in all it was a fantastic day and a perfect extension of the actual wedding, capped off with a little Whisky tasting… actually far too much whisky tasting (weirdly conducted by Liam despite it being only the second time he’d ever had Whisky whilst I stood aside with my nearly 10 year whisky drinking experience… to be fair though we actually completely converted my father-in-law to whisky that night so Liam did a pretty good job!). Then, having drunk the night away, it was time to do some rapid and slightly disorientated packing ready to fly the following morning! I’m not going to lie, about half my clothes didn’t make it! Ah well, we had everything for the wedding anyway… more or less!

Taking the Whisky was more important than the rings right?! 😉