White Wedding OR Court?

Ok, so I've said here that I've been planning my destination white wedding. Well the experience so far has been anything but pleasant for me. I don't think I'm one of the girls who dreamt about her wedding day from the time she was a little kid and has obsessed about it from the time she turned 23. Let me just digress a little bit and tell you the story of one of my friends who till date is the most wedding crazed girl I know. She is 29 and she has her ENTIRE wedding planned to the hilt, but the rub is that she doesn't have a boyfriend. She's not even close to being in a relationship with anyone right now. Yet homegirl has the venue, the church, the decor, the color scheme, the dress, the bridesmaids dress, everything planned out. She actually wanted to book a venue but I had to stop her! She wanted to book the venue and church because she says the church she wants has a long waiting list (like a year or so) so she wants to book it now so that by the time it comes she won't have to worry about the place being unavailable for her desired date. Isn't that funny? I was always look at her and just shake my head. The only non-close family wedding I've been too, she's the one that dragged me there. Funny girl.

Anyway back to my post, so the long and short of it is that I have never been a "wedding, wedding" kinda girl. I don't think I've ever really dreamt of my on day, or of me putting on a wedding dress. It's weird, like I like watching all those shows on the Style network but I never imagine ME doing all those things. It was like a mystical event that happened in a parallel universe where grown women act like complete princesses and spend tens of thousands of dollars to do so, but it was just never the scope of reality for me. Attempting to plan my wedding so far has just brought all of that to the forefront. I don't get giddy with excitement about all the little details of planning and really, it just drives me nuts and makes me go bonkers. The other day I went to find out prices to print invitation cards at the Wedding Store in Ikeja and the lady there brings out these 3 huge binders of samples, I truly was bored by the tenth page of the first one! It WAS quite boring. Then there are colors and different shades of green and fuschia and gold and on and on and on. I mean how is someone supposed to actually make a choice? The way I see it is that there are so many options out there that it actually doesn't really matter which one you pick, you can just close your eyes and point and the likelihood that you will pick something that's alright is very high so why the drama? Even the wedding dress that I think everyone says the bride is so into, I'm not so into. I picked a dress, mostly because i was tired of looking through theknot.com's parade of like 3000 dresses, and sent the picture to my mom and she freaked out and sent it back because it was too "simple". And all this and I haven't even started talking about dealing with potential vendors. I email a couple of so-called wedding planners and they never emailed me back which to me is rude, I should NOT be begging anyone to be my wedding planner, it's not charity now, abi? I'd be paying so I thought they should show a little more enthusiasm for collecting my money. Same goes for the venue, after going back and forth with them for two weeks (i confirmed availability of my date even before that) they started trying to play games with me and the guy says there's another couple "competing" for my date and tried to get me to throw in some of their other services. I just got disgusted and really uninterested in the place. Sunday night, after not hearing from me for two days, the venue guy then sends an email that the venue is now available and the other couple has picked a date! Lies! I don't want to work with liars!

So that has brought me here: I don't want to plan any wedding. I'd rather have a court wedding and a marriage blessing after. No reception. At least so I think. I told my mother and while I don't think she understands it, I think she's willing to let me have my way. We haven't decided completely though. Some of my considerations are that our rent comes up mid next year, it's $25,000 and we have to pay for two years plus service charge of $8,000! If I have all my white wedding trimmings now, how will we pay rent next year enh? And we don't want to cash out any of our savings or investments for the wedding, we'd rather keep that money in an education trust or something. The other consideration is that I want to go here for our honeymoon:





Yep! That's the Maldive Islands, so beautiful. The problem is it's very expensive and the ever cash conscious beau will NOT be going there if we continued with our destination white wedding. The last consideration is my ring. So my engagement ring has diamonds around the band as well as the solitary stone in the middle, so a couple of weeks ago Bolaji and I were talking and I mentioned to him that I'd like a matching wedding band as well, meaning a wedding band that also had diamonds around the band as opposed to a plain wedding band. he voiced some concerns about being able to afford it so I dropped it. But now I told him, I said if we do a court wedding, then i AM getting my diamond band and he agreed! Really what it boils down to is if we cut the white wedding out (which I don't want to plan anyway), then we can afford to do a lot more and still save money.

So ladies (and gentlemen?) what should I go for now that I've told you all my considerations?

Court Wedding?



Nice, chic, classy, ceremony, where I'll wear a nice 50's style short dress with my hair back in a bun with a flower and nice white pumps. I think I'll wear something like this (minus the veil):




and then I'll do a marriage blessing service at my church. For those that don't know much about it, a marriage blessing is traditionally done in an orthodox church if the couple has already done the civil ceremony. The order of the ceremony is almost exactly like the one for a wedding except there's no exchange of rings (the rings are just blessed instead), the couple enter the church together, and there's a prayer of penitence. I'm a methodist and I've already spoken to the Reverend about this (he thought we were pregnant! we're not!). For the marriage blessing service I'd wear something like this:




OR

White Wedding?

Destination wedding in a beautiful wine estate. The entire wine estate will be rented out by our wedding party which means about 22 of our guests would be able to stay in the guesthouses. The wedding itself will look like this:










A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. court wedding allows me to have my maldives honeymoon, diamond wedding band, and not have to move from "the island" to "the mainland" lol.

2. Most of Bolaji and I's close family members live outside Nigeria so will have to travel either way

3. Full white wedding in Nigeria is NOT an option. NEVER. EVER. either blessing or destination wedding.

Ok so what do you guys think? I'm going to make up my mind fully by the end of the week and I'd like to have your opinions it would really help me decide. I've been praying about this as well. I think I know what God told me yesterday but I'm still praying.