September 22, 2022: We Got Married (and Almost Lost Our Dog in the Process)

I've known for a long time that I didn't want a wedding. A party I'm definitely down for, but arranging a time for people to come sit and watch me slowly walk 100 feet in a dress never quite felt like my cup of tea. So, my request was to get married at City Hall and, as you might imagine, Matt didn't put up a fight on that one. We also agreed that regardless of how low key we wanted the experience to be, we wanted our families there, so we decided on: City Hall wedding, drinks later on* with any friends who were in the city, and a nice dinner with our immediate families.

Matt and I believe that the number 22 is lucky for us both as a couple and as individuals -- we met on April 22nd, Matt moved to New York on August 22nd, I started two significant jobs on June 22nd (over a decade apart)... you get the picture. So we decided on September 22nd of this year. Both of our families came into town for about a week and we got to spend some quality time. My brother, Kevin, was the best maid of honor a girl could ask for and went with me to pick out my bouquet and get a mani / pedi.

The day did not start off particularly smoothly. For one, I had a couple of friends who were going to come to where I was getting my hair and make up done to make it more festive, but given that it was a weekday (Thursday) morning, they had to cancel for various work reasons. Another, and certainly the more inconvenient, hiccup was that after a full week of truly beautiful 70-degree, sunny weather in New York, we woke up at 6am on the morning of the wedding to thunder, lightning, and rain. I know they say that rain on your wedding day is good luck -- or at least ironic -- but c'mon, throw me a bone here.

Thankfully, I had a resourceful hair and makeup artist who not only created a fun and light atmosphere while making me look the most beautiful I probably will ever be in my entire life, but also fashioned a wedding dress rain protection system (a trash bag with two holes for my feet) and ushered me into a Lyft to go meet my soon-to-be husband and our photographer, January, at City Hall.

When I arrived at the designated meeting place (late), I was greeted by an excited Sally who, wearing her special white-and-rose-gold wedding collar, immediately stood on her hind legs and placed two perfect tiny paw prints on my dress; it was hard to be mad at her since she appeared to be giving her stamp of approval. Matt and I took pictures around some of the older buildings in downtown Manhattan with their pretty mosaics and iron gates; luckily for us, after a little while the rain started to let up.

As we made our way to the Manhattan Marriage Bureau ("Slowly! No, walk slower!" January would shout as we walked), Matt noticed what looked like a shoe print on my dress, right at the butt**. I started trying to rub the marks out and asked Matt if that made it better, to which he replied "Do... you want me to lie to you?" Honestly, that was probably the correct response. Admittedly, I was wearing a long white dress in New York City; I'm not really sure what I was expecting as someone who rarely gets through a day wearing a white shirt without spilling something on it.

While in line to get into the Marriage Bureau (they only let couples and their one witness in by appointment), Matt's family arrived and I was getting text updates from my brother letting me know they were driving down from the Upper West Side and would be there shortly. So, we went in and, while waiting our turn to take our vows, got to experience some pretty top notch people watching.

When we were summoned into the small, unadorned room by the officiant, she instructed us to face each other and emphasized that we should only look at each other and we don't need to acknowledge her. It initially felt like a strangely blunt directive, but it was the best thing she could have told us to do. It forced us to be present and focused on each other, and in that moment all of the stress from earlier in the day and earlier that week just floated away. And rather than everything being a blur as it probably would have been, that moment is now seared into my memory. Truly, that officiant gave me the greatest wedding gift I could have asked for.

So, we said our "I dos" and started to make our way outside, where we were greeted by Matt's family and Sally... but my family was nowhere to be found. Almost as soon as I got outside, I got a text from Kevin saying "You inside?" to which I replied, "Uh, we just walked outside." "Like... done?""Yep." "Whoa." As it turned out, the UN was in town and they got caught in such terrible traffic that it took them over an hour-and-a-half to get to the Marriage Bureau from the UWS (for non-New Yorker context, that drive would have probably been 30-45 minutes on a normal day).

It didn't feel right to have this celebratory moment without them, so Matt and I snuck back into the building and waited. Evidently, after we went back in, Sally lost her damn mind and decided that she'd had enough of this shit, so she squirreled her way out of her collar and ran to find us.

Thankfully, Matt's family was able to get her back relatively quickly but I'm sure they lost a couple of seconds off their life from the stress of that experience. About 20 minutes later, we got the go-ahead that my family was in place and we re-exited the building, greeted by our families and, this time, rose petals.

I will say that the coolest thing about getting married in New York, especially downtown Manhattan, is the amount of love you get from random strangers on the street. People in cars driving past would roll down their windows to say "Congratulations!" We had a group of tourists on a double decker bus take pictures of us. Our favorite was a woman in her 80s on a motorized wheelchair who, begrudgingly, wished us well even though we were, according to her, in her way while we were waiting for the bus to get back home. It made the experience a "New York" experience.

After about 30 more minutes of pictures in City Hall Park, we had a hangry Matt on our hands and we decided to take Sally, shivering and traumatized from the afternoon, back to our apartment to take a moment and reset ourselves before meeting our friends and family at Mother's Ruin for our celebratory cocktails (and to get the shoe print off my ass**).

Getting that 45 minutes to ourselves in our apartment to reset with a grilled cheese sandwich and a record playing on the stereo was just what the doctor ordered. When we got to the bar at 5pm, the sun started to come out and all of the patrons (mostly strangers to us at that point) gave us a round of applause as we walked up. Over the course of the next few hours we welcomed our closest friends and family to celebrate our wedding with us and we were able to relax and have fun. A few folks joined us at a second bar where they put on "our song" (a default song that we keep meaning to replace with something else) and we got to share a dance as husband and wife. There are some things you expect to forgo when you do a quick City Hall wedding, a first dance being one of them, so it was a pleasant surprise to be able to share that intimate moment and all the more "us" that it was in a New York dive bar on St. Mark's.

After about 30 minutes at the second bar, Matt turned to me and with nothing but earnestness said "I need to go home. Right now." So, at 10pm we got home, ordered a pizza and before the pie arrived, both Matt and Sally had fallen asleep and I got an entire pizza to myself. The next evening we did some family pictures (how often will we get both of our entire families together?) and enjoyed a big dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Bar Primi. It was one of the best meals I've had -- and the most wine I've had in a single sitting.

As we walked home from dinner having said goodbye to our families after nearly a week of visiting, I broke down crying; it was the release of a lot of emotions, mostly the stress from the last couple of months (moving apartments, the wedding), but the biggest thing that had been brewing for a few weeks prior to our wedding was that I was really missing my mom and sad that she wasn't going to be a part of all of this. I'm sure she would have made me crazy and would have added a layer of complication I didn't need, but she would have loved all of it. And I would have loved having her there, even when I didn't love it.

All in all, our wedding was very "us": things didn't go according to plan, it rained, I got something on my butt, Matt was hangry, but eventually the sun came out and we got to share the day with some of our dearest friends and family, plus a few special moments with just the two of us. It worked, and I don't think I'd change a thing.

We've still got a honeymoon to plan, but for now given everything we have going on in other parts of our lives, we're just focused on settling in and enjoying the everyday moments we get together.

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*Credit for the suggestion to host post-wedding cocktails goes to my dear friend Erin, who rebutted my insistence that we should forgo a reception altogether because I didn't want make a big deal out of it and pointed out that the people in our close-knit circles would want to celebrate this milestone -- and celebrate us -- so we should let them. Thank you, Erin, for reminding me that it's okay to be feted every now and again.

**We figured out later that the "shoe print" was actually from a hand. Matt's hand. Our photographer had asked Matt to move one of the iron gates to clear the background and, as a result, he must have gotten some dirt on his hands... which made their way to my butt when we were taking pictures. Evidence below.