Meet Martine & Chris. Not even a little rain could stop them from undoubtedly celebrating having a blast on their big day. While Martine's love for planning may have inspired her to start her own wedding planning company, This Modern Love Events, LLC, She didn't love dealing with the ever-dreaded guest list drama. Enjoy Martine's I Guess I Do moments in her own words below...
Chris and I got married on May 25, 2013 in Montreal Canada. We are both from the US (he's from Wisconsin, I'm from New York and we both currently live in Connecticut), but we fell in love with Montreal the first time we visited there 4 years ago over our birthday weekend (yes, we both share the exact same birthday of May 10th--we were just born two years apart).
When we got engaged, we knew we wanted to have a destination wedding because 1) anyone who knows us knows that we LOVE to travel 2) Since his family still lives in Wisconsin, they would have had to travel regardless, so we thought it only fair to make everyone travel and 3) It was the best way to keep our guest list under control since we were mostly paying for the wedding ourselves. We had an incredible turnout though--about 120 guests came from all over (New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, California, Florida, Oregon, North Carolina, etc.) to celebrate our wedding weekend with us.
Since we opted to pay for most of the wedding costs ourselves, we had to greatly limit the number of people we invited. I come from a HUGE family and we would have had to invite them all if we had the wedding locally in NYC or CT, so we thought having a destination wedding would get most people to understand that we were trying to have an intimate wedding.
My I Guess I Do moment came when there was a HUGE amount of drama amongst my side of the family regarding the guest list--I had one cousin get extremely offended that she wasn't invited to the wedding (even though I only see this person once a year and we never talk otherwise). On top of that, I had my dad add in all these last minute people to the guest list (something that caused us to get into a huge argument). I had to explain to him about why we simply couldn't afford to keep adding people to the guest list. This all happened about 3 months before my wedding and prior to that, I was enjoying every moment of wedding planning. I was pretty upset for a week or so, but after making a few concessions for my dad's sake, decided that I wasn't going to let anyone tell me what I HAD to do or who I HAD to invite. We wanted to be surrounded by people who actually loved and cared about us, so we knew we had to stick to our original plan of keeping the guest list in check.
And in the end, I'm so glad we choose to invite the people we did. It was the most perfect day ever because not only did I get to marry the love of my life, but we had a whole weekend with the friends and family we were closest to. I'm so happy I get to look back on our photos and video and am able to identify each and every person in the room celebrating with us.
Despite the bit of frustration I experienced with the guest list, I found myself still loving all things weddings (after all, I had been a featured blogger on WeddingBee, so I decided to change careers and start planning weddings professionally!) I got my certification through the Association of Bridal Consultants and recently launched my own wedding planning company, This Modern Love Events, LLC.
And if you loved the look of Martine's wedding, she can help you plan & create a style of your own! Check out This Modern Love Events and show her some love on Facebook, Twitter, & Pinterest!
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