I originally wrote this in 2010 as a guest post for a blog that’s, sadly, not up anymore. Ten years later, I’ve decided to republish here. Woo!

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A week ago, Anna asked me very, very nicely if I’d be willing to write a post about what a wedding means to me. Of course, I said. Of course I will. After all, I had my wedding just a little over two months ago. Surely there is some small chunk of perspective I can offer.

I immediately opened up a new Word document and proceeded to stare at the white space for upwards of ten minutes. What could I say about weddings that hadn’t been said before, and even better than I could have ever said in the first place? Ladies smarter than I have already written about how a wedding is an opportunity to establish yourselves as a family, and how a wedding brings together our scattered and disparate family-tribes for a much-needed happy ritual.

These are true, essential things about weddings. These things are what a wedding means to me.

But what else does it mean? That blank white screen wasn’t telling me.

So I thought about my own experiences, and the experiences of my friends. The stories I’ve heard. The struggles we’ve gone through to work towards marriage consciously. To relearn the bad behaviors we may have been taught. To make our peace with where we’re headed in life , how we’re changing, and what it all means. How does having a wedding — months of planning for a one-day-only “event” — fit into all that? Why go through it at all?

Well, a wedding is about figuring out what’s important to you. Yeah, there’s already a lot of emphasis around crafting a wedding perfectly tailored to your personalities — and in my culture, that usually means colors, themes, and centerpieces. But one of the most liberating moments of the planning for my beau and I was the realization that we could hand-pick the values that mean the most to us and build our entire wedding around them. Sure, sometimes materialistic impulses or highly opinionated family members can get in the way of what you and your partner truly want out of your wedding. Yet in the end, our wedding allowed us to strip ourselves down to our roots and say: “this is the core of what we believe in.” We got very few comments from guests about our the way our wedding looked, but I couldn’t even begin to count how many people came up and told us how our wedding made them feel. And that is a very powerful thing.

A wedding is a crash course in becoming a partner. The very act of putting a wedding together builds a foundation for your future relationship — even if you’ve already been with that person for a very long time. The beau and I had already discussed what we wanted out of our relationship long before the engagement came, but the wedding was the trigger that began to put those words into action.

In that same vein, a wedding is about learning how to work as a team. The beau and I had already established ourselves as adults independently of one another well before we met, and our wedding suddenly pitched us onto awkward, tenuous ground. Everything each of us had was now “ours” instead of “mine” and “his,” and the wedding was the biggest “ours” of them all. It was our baby, our project, our thing we had to work towards together. The wedding and all its incumbent challenges — how do we negotiate our different budget styles? how do we talk with each other when we disagree? — was like one long, giant test with questions about issues we’d never needed to discuss before. Nothing could have prepared us for that.

In other words, our wedding was our first opportunity as a couple to talk about the really hard stuff.

A wedding is about redefining relationships. Just as our wedding was a formal way for the beau and I to establish ourselves as a family, it was also a way for our original families to formally recognize us as such. I know my parents will always view me as their child, but now, in their eyes, I am bound with someone else. And yet instead of “losing” me, they have in a sense gained another child. The day after our wedding, my parents stopped by our house and surprised us with a “welcome to the family” gift for the beau, and then some gifts that acknowledged the status of our new family: wine to open on our future anniversaries, a quilt with a double ring pattern on it, and a bit of gold as an investment. It was a moving gesture that helped establish our new roles in each others’ lives.

A wedding is both making and honoring history. Ours tied us to the generations that came before we even existed — creating a powerful connection to our forebears who once stood in our places.

A wedding is community. Whether that means 350 cherished individuals plucked from your circles, or just your immediate family and closest friends — these people are who made and shaped you. We chose to pay our people tribute during the ceremony by having them briefly hold our wedding rings, imbuing them with their spirits.

A wedding is a party. Pure and simple. It’s an excuse to create joy where there was once none.

And lastly, a wedding is hope.

So now I turn it back to you guys: what does a wedding mean to you?