Thoughts on - eloping

And why it was the best thing we ever did

I saw a vox pop about weddings abroad doing the rounds again this week, one that I’ve seen before.

The interviewer was asking the good people of Manchester their thoughts on couples who choose to get married abroad. The general consensus was that it is selfish. Some cited that it’s unfair to ask loved ones to spend so much money on travelling to attend (valid). One older lady said that a couple she knew eloped and that the pictures were ‘the most lonely photographs you could imagine’ (questionable), while one lad pointed out that weddings should be all about the couple.

We have been lucky enough to attend just about every kind of wedding over the years, from Adam’s cousin who got wed on a stunning island near Dubrovnik and friends who got married on an Cheshire farm to small, imitate village hall weddings and more lavish ones in castles with hundreds of guests.

I have loved them all. There’s something special about getting all dressed up and crying (or groaning) at speeches and dancing to Mr. Brightside with someones great-auntie who you’ve never met before and even better if there’s a dog or cat lurking around the grounds.

Almost nine years ago, me and Adam said our vows in front of two strangers on the other side of the world. No relatives or friends or fanfare to be seen.

Eloping wasn’t our initial plan though.

We had looked at so many ‘traditional’ locations in Wales (where Adam is from), Greater Manchester (my neck of the woods) and Chester (almost in the middle) but just couldn’t seem to make it work.

We had a total budget of about £6,000 which was very much on the modest side - I know a bride who spent more than that on her dress.

Half of it came from a compo payout after a lorry driver rear ended us while he was busy texting on the M60 instead of paying attention and wrote our car off as a result. We were lucky to come away fairly unharmed. It did leave me with a chronic fear of driving afterwards but the unexpected money came in handy.

The rest was generously gifted from parents and grandparents and after spending decades living below the breadline, I knew how to make every penny count.

Or so I thought.

We got quoted £12,000 for a bang average 3* hotel venue in North Wales that smelt of ham and had dusty curtains. We looked at train stations and social clubs and village halls.

All for good locations for a knees up but the minute we uttered the word ‘wedding’, the price seemed to rocket and hidden extras such as premium fees for weekend dates, minimum numbers and no external catering clauses felt stifling.

We considered a midweek wedding, being extra ruthless with the guest list and other nifty cost cutting ideas but kept facing barriers.

Auntie Jane was away on the dates we’d looked at. Uncle Bob didn’t want to drive to Chester. We couldn’t invite my favourite cousins without the rest of my (massive) extended family.

All very normal wedding challenges but frankly, after a few months of throwing suggestions around and spending our weekends visiting venues, we joked about running away to Vegas and getting Elvis to do it instead.

Then it stopped being a joke.

We looked at locations in the UK and abroad and settled on New York. I was wary about how our loved ones would react but it was mostly positive.

In October 2016, we flew to JFK with no guests, not even my then-teen daughters who stayed at home with their grandparents. We stayed in Manhattan and after spending time getting to know the city, we picked up our $25 marriage licence ready for a simple ceremony the next day.

After getting ready together in the hotel- I wore a simple white knee length dress and veil and Adam wore a dark blue suits and tie - we got a taxi to the City Clerk’s office to meet up with the wonderful Janay; a native New Yorker and professional photographer who had also agreed over email to be our witness.

I bought a bouquet of flowers from a stall outside, with blue hydrangeas as a nod to my late grandma and white roses to add a sense of occasion. We lined up with dozens of other couples in the sterile waiting area and waited our for our names to be called.

We signed some paperwork and said our vows in front of Janay and the registrar and it was all over and done with in about ten minutes. Efficient and stress-free and incredibly liberating.

The three of us headed to Brooklyn for the afternoon. We posed for our official wedding pictures before stopping for lunch at Shake Shack, where a little girl asked for a picture with me and older couple gave us $50 as a wedding gift.

We sent pictures home in the various family group chats and video called the girls after they finished school before spending the evening at an atmospheric, fairy tale (expensive) restaurant in Greenwich Village, eating steak and drinking cocktails, just the two of us.

After bouncing around various government buildings to make sure that our new marriage was legal in the UK, we began what I still maintain is the most romantic week of my life to date.

Squeezing hands as we watched penguins in Central Park zoo, exploring museums, spending hours walking and talking and getting to know each other on an even deeper level while in a bubble of selfish, hazy escapism.

A few weeks after we got home, we hosted a reception in the Grade II listed Oakfield Manor in the grounds of Chester Zoo and spent an evening celebrating with around 100 of our nearest and dearest.

We re-used my siblings wedding bunting and cake stand (who had handily got married a few months before us), picked up flowers from the supermarket and popped them in old milk bottles, dotted framed vintage NYC postcards around the venue and ordered a simple ‘naked’ cake online. It was the most millennial Pinterest wedding reception you ever did see, all burlap, luggage tags and brown string, but we had managed to pull off the whole thing, including our NYC adventure, for less than £6,000.

Adam and I only saw each other once that night as we endured an awkward first dance that neither of us wanted to do, set to a Stevie Wonder song that we picked out of thin air the week before (‘Feeling This’ by Blink-182 was not an appropriate choice apparently).

Almost nine years on, we both still maintain that eloping was the best thing we ever did.

We are both introverts and the idea of walking down the aisle and exchanging such imitate promises in front of everyone we know made me want to vomit. Was it selfish? Probably. But for us, our lifestyle and our financial situation, it was the perfect solution and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Image: Janay Kristine, NYC