Planning Our Adventure Elopement Pt 1: Our Why

“WHAT?! How could you?! You’re not inviting anybody? Not even your parents?!?!” 

Just a few questions we’re asked on a pretty regular basis regarding our decision to elope in the mountains of North Carolina without any guests… yes, that includes our parents.

Welcome to the first part in this blog series. As a wedding photographer who’s goal is to photograph more of these adventurous and unique intimate ceremonies and celebrations, it only made sense to enlighten all of you on our own decision to do it this way! Possibly to your surprise, as a person in the industry, I am not an expert at planning my own wedding by any means! In fact, I’ve found it’s completely different from helping someone else do it. It’s for that reason that I feel that I have a very unique perspective into this relatively new idea of adventurous & intimate weddings, and I can’t wait to share the entire process with you. 🙂

I wanted to start out by giving you our “why”. Why Roman and I decided that this was definitely the route we wanted to take, and why we never even second guessed it for a minute!

DISCLAIMER: Big weddings or even smaller traditional weddings are great for a lot of people!! Roman and I simply had different interests at heart and this is what worked for us, but it might not for you! Not trying to push my agenda on any couple by any means. 

Roman proposed to me on May 14th, 2018 in Big Sur. It was awesome and adorable and then we drove to LA to get a REALLY fancy dinner (of which we were shocked to see the bill HAHA), and it was one of the best days of my life thus far! Fast forward a few weeks, we’re back home on the east coast, still high on the excitement of the proposal… with absolutely no desire to plan a wedding. Zero. We didn’t want to look at venues, we didn’t want to pick bridesmaids & groomsmen, we didn’t want to look at vendors… the only thing that I was excited for was dress shopping (figures). But we didn’t want to do any of those things because none of it felt like us. Roman and I keep to ourselves mostly. Honestly, the biggest learning curve in running a service based business on my own has been opening up online about my personal life. It’s hard for us to work a room at a party! So naturally, we’re just not in favor of a big ceremony where I’d just be worried that everyone else is having fun!

We were basically feeling extremely pressured now to follow a bunch of traditions that we just… didn’t care about. This was really confusing for me, because at this point I was just really getting into photographing weddings and I was loving every second of it. I cry at father daughter dances, I geek out when mom is helping the bride in her dress; like, I really LOVE weddings! But I had also just starting dabbling in the beauty of adventure elopements, and they always (as the kids say) *hit different* for me. 

As soon as I let myself even consider it for a second, my excitement for Roman and I’s wedding was through the roof! I remember waiting for him to get off of work so I could pitch the idea to him, and I remember being so scared to ask him. When I asked, I don’t think he knew what an elopement was because I think he thought I was asking if we just didn’t get married at all… sorry for the heart attack, babe!

Buuut he was quickly onboard with it too. And this is why I think it’s perfect for us!

Roman and I never ever ever talked about wedding plans, but we’ve always been sure that we wanted to get married. You’d think sometime in those conversations wedding ideas would have come up, but they never did. 

We’re two introverted kids at heart who don’t really like the idea of completely growing up. Planning a wedding for us became such a stressor that we hated to even talk about it. We aren’t fond of attention, and aren’t entirely able to justify spending the money on a wedding day that would only make us feel totally out of place and uncomfortable. 

We really appreciate alone time, quiet moments, being present… all things that are a little difficult to achieve on a crazy wedding day. It is VERY important to us that every moment of our day is precious and focused on each other, rather than the unimportant details.

Hiking is not something we do a lot, I’ll be honest, but it’s definitely something we always long to do and wish we did more often. We’re cold weather mountain people and NOT beach people, so a summer beach wedding was out of the question!!

And just because I know I’ll get asked, no one is invited because that is where things get entirely way too complicated. That’s when things get pricier, plans get changed, and people get their feelings hurt. So to solve this problem, we are having a SIMPLE reception to celebrate with all of our loved ones in July for dancing and a good ole time- nothing more, nothing less. 🙂 Easy fix there!

Plus, a little inside tip: plan your ceremony on a mountain top and no one else will want to go through that trouble anyway. Hehehe

I hope this gave you a little insight on how Roman and I came to such a crazy conclusion for our intimate vows, and I’ll be back next week with information on first steps and how we picked the location. 

Thanks for following along friends!!