When my husband and I got engaged we had no savings in the bank. Honestly not a penny. This wasn’t a wedding to merge assets, clearly: We did it because we wanted to gather all our loved ones before everyone got too busy, too far away, or too dead to be there. When we decided to do it, it was January, freezing cold, and we were drunk. Two weeks later, we were sat in the same bar in the same exact seats—and drinking the same pét-nat wine, because we are the generation who would rather spend $30 on a bottle than save for a mortgage—and we were firing off an email to everyone we’ve ever known telling them to save the date: July, the same year. Why not?
We’d both lived our twenties from paycheck to paycheck, and between us, we’d put on shows and club nights, thrown massive parties, released albums, and made theatre, always somehow solving the problem of a (lack of) budget without any savings in the bank. How hard could a wedding be?
A year prior, I had published a book asking whether we should (and by we here, I mean everyone) even get married? What a colossal waste of money, time, energy, and imagination. If all the bridezillas and fussy gay men in the world put the same amount of energy and creativity into, say, solving climate change then we’d be looking at a much brighter future. And yet here we were, scratching our heads about how to throw a wedding on no money, for a growing guest list (by now—February—we were hitting 200 RSVP yeses, which makes us sound popular but really just speaks to our want for chaos).
Something I learned while writing this book, in an interview with the world’s most sought-after wedding planner, was that people will love a wedding if it reflects the couple’s values. We had both grown up on the queer scene in London—we had nurtured, and been nurtured by, our community. And, even though marriage equality was in many ways a mirage for said community, we wanted to try to make our wedding feel like a queer community event. One that everyone could feel loved at; one that felt romantic and sexy and fun.
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