There is not a single person on planet Earth who says the most important ‘yes’ of their life to a very special someone down on one knee and immediately starts thinking about champagne towers or sparkler exits or whether or not having a first look “ruins the magic.”

I’m sorry, but people as gloriously human as you don’t do that.

It isn’t until some stranger on the Internet steps in with their unsolicited two cents that you start questioning how to plan a day you were pretty sure you had a pretty good handle on before the web browser loaded.

Do I recognize the irony in being a stranger on the Internet about to give you her two cents? Absolutely. But instead of giving you a bunch of strangely specific wedding ideas that I’m in no place to give you because I don’t even know you (yet), I’d rather remind you what this whole getting married thing is really about.

You’re a human in love. So irrationally, irrevocably, brilliantly in love that you’ve decided to spend the rest of your life with another human. And for one afternoon, every other human who has had a hand in making you capable of loving like that gets to watch it happen.

That right there? That’s the magic, and that kind of magic is pretty hard to ruin. Especially when you remember that your wedding is a room full of proof. Proof that you’ve been loved. Raised. Forgiven. Admired. Changed. Known.

Every single choice you make on your wedding day is simply another way of saying: “This is how we got here, and this is who we did it with.”

So, no, I don’t really care whether you cut the cake or toss the bouquet or have your first dance under a spotlight or string lights or the fluorescent bulbs of your local courthouse. In fact, I don’t care about anything you don’t care about. As a documentary wedding photographer, I only care whether your wedding looks irrationally, irrevocably, brilliantly like the two humans who decided to willingly sign up for the rest of their lives together. 

Here’s what I hope you get right.

I hope your wedding is messy.

For the love of all things candid wedding photography, I hope you allow your wedding day to be absolute chaos.

I hope your getting ready suite looks like someone actually got ready in it—shoes kicked under chairs, half-finished coffees growing cold on windowsills, and extension cords to curling irons crawling across every available surface.

I hope your grandma leaves a lipstick stain on your cheek. I hope you don’t bother to wipe it away. 

I hope your first look gets botched when your groom accidentally walks out to the courtyard you’re trying to sneak through. I hope you don’t care one little bit.

I hope your timeline ends up with pen marks all over it because conversations ran long, hugs lasted longer, and nobody wanted to be the first to leave. I hope your dress hem collects grass stains, your cheeks hurt from laughing, and your mascara ends up on at least ten different guests’ shoulders. I hope you never know what time it is.

It’s easy to convince yourself a “good” wedding is one where nothing goes wrong and a “meaningful” one is where you thought everything through twelve times over.

But when I look at the most authentic photos I’ve ever taken, the ones that scream “now THAT was a wedding” are the ones where people were too busy living to notice their veil had gone askew or the timeline was fifteen minutes behind or the flower girl had wandered off to sneak her third cupcake in thirty minutes.

People think candid wedding photography means catching people off guard, but I think it’s really a matter of creating enough room for people to forget the camera is there in the first place— and giving them permission to make a mess worth remembering.

I hope you feel safe to come as you are.

You might have the urge to become Wedding People. You might think you have to become Wedding People in order to pull this thing off the way you’re allegedly “supposed to.”

Please don’t. 

Don’t suddenly become subdued just because all eyes are on you. Don’t become somebody else’s version of romantic just because you think it’s expected of you. Don’t smile bigger or laugh harder or kiss longer unless you were doing it anyway… and certainly don’t do it for the photos. 

If you want authentic wedding photography, stay as you are and as you’ve always been. The most stunning thing you’ll wear on your wedding day won’t be your dress or tux. It will be comfort. (I’m telling you, comfort looks really, really good on people.)

Come as you are, and I’ll come running.

I hope you host your people well.

I’m just going to get straight to the point:

Your favorite people are going to uproot their calendar, book flights, find babysitters, buy outfits they’ll probably never wear again, and travel however many miles to celebrate you.

Pardon my humble opinion, but I think that’s worth taking seriously.

A whole lot of humans are about to say yes to spending their Saturday with you, and that makes you very, very lucky.

Feed them well. Introduce the people who absolutely need to know each other. Build a timeline with enough breathing room for conversations that weren’t supposed to happen but become the ones you can’t imagine the day happening without. Make every single person feel like they belong there. (Pull a Meg and Bella, and write every single guest a letter, while you’re at it.)

The most meaningful and elevated weddings make every single person in the room feel like they’re part of the story.

I hope your wedding holds evidence of what existed before it.

Your wedding day is only one chapter in your love story. An essential one? Absolutely. The whole story, on the other hand? Not even close.

By the time you say “I do,” you’ll already have a thousand tiny pieces of your life together tucked into the corners of who you are. A couple hundred inside jokes and habits. Places that changed you. People that raised you. Songs you turn all the way up and recipes you make every other Sunday when the rest of the world goes quiet. 

I hope all of that comes with you.

Long after you’ve forgotten what your signature cocktail tasted like or whether or not your ceremony started right on time, the signs of the life that existed before the wedding are the things that will bring you back to this day.

I’m looking for the way your mom instinctively reaches for your face when you laugh, as if holding it between her hands will help her hold it in her memory. I’m looking for the dog hair on your suit jacket because your best friend surprised you by bringing your (other) best friend to the first look. I’m waiting for the song that makes your college roommates go into hysterics the second the guitar riff rings out, or the shimmy you bust out for your first dance because Schitt’s Creek is your couple comfort show, and it’s only right that David Rose makes an appearance.

Those little Easter eggs tell the truth about who you are, how you’ve loved each other up until now, and how you’ll love each other for every day after.

Your wedding is a rare opportunity to see all of your history gathered in one place to celebrate your future. If that isn’t the coolest thing ever, I don’t know what is.

I hope you can’t help but notice the miracle in the room.

I know it’s hard, but forget about the flowers and the venue and everything else involved in the design of the day itself. Just for a minute, consider this, instead:

Your wedding will be one of the only days in your entire life where everyone who has ever loved you will be in the same place at the same time.

Just think about that for a second. 

For one night only, whatever weird twist of cosmic intervention brought you and your person together will also be what gets all of the humans who matter most to you in the same room.

Your childhood best friend and your college roommate might bond over their shared love of 90s rom com. Your kindergarten teacher will probably hug your mom harder than she’d like. Your grandpa could meet the coworker who helped you survive your first year after moving away from home. 

Your worlds—every little pocket of them that you’ve collected over decades of being alive—will collide and stand shoulder to shoulder for all of ten hours because they have one very specific, very important thing in common:

You. 

I don’t know about you, but that feels a whole lot more miraculous than whether your napkins matched your invitation suite.

I hope everything you choose is something that matters to you.

I hope every decision you make has one really good reason behind it:

You wanted to. That’s it. No dissertation required.

If you want to fly everyone halfway across the world to Europe, do it—just don’t forget to bring me along. If you want to go to the courthouse in downtown Saint Paul on a Wednesday afternoon wearing your favorite blue sundress, do it. If you want to redefine amateur hour by having your friend do the florals (and absolutely kill it, might I add), even though she has never done wedding florals a day in her life… DO IT.

Whatever you do, do it because it’s yours. Make it so true to you that they’ll put ‘because she wanted to’ on your headstone someday. 

When every choice comes back to you—your people, your priorities, your story—the most luxurious part about your wedding will be that you can look back in twenty years and still remember every last bit of it so acutely, so potently, because it all belonged to you in the first place.

That’s the wedding. Everything else is just the address where it happened.

Your wedding isn’t a performance where you play your Very Best Version of Wedding People. It’s a single day—in a very long but not quite long enough life—that happens to matter a lot. 

And on this one day in a very long but not quite long enough life, you will be standing there with more evidence than you’ll know what to do with that you’ve been loved well enough to love someone else so much that you’d willingly sign up to hand them forever. 

It’ll be in the lipstick stain on your aunt’s wine glass that tells the story of how she got halfway through an impromptu toast before crying. In your dad instinctively reaching to fix your crooked collar because fatherhood doesn’t know the difference between five and twenty-five. In the way your best friend doesn’t knock before walking into the bridal suite because she hasn’t needed permission in fifteen years.

In the inside jokes no one else at table six understands. In your nephew sprinting across the dance floor because he’s convinced this is, in fact, his party. In the half-finished cocktails abandoned on tables because the conversation was way more important anyway. 

Your wedding isn’t proof that you had a wedding. It’s proof that you had a life before one, and it all came full circle on this one day in a very long but not quite long enough life.