If you know me in real life, chances are you know that I’m recently engaged to this lovely woman. If you didn’t know that, well now you do. Huzzah! I put together a web site, jonwyn.com and was planning on using that as the repository for all things Jon + Bronwyn (Jonwyn), but haven’t gotten around to doing too much with that site. So for the time being at least, I’ll be writing about the wedding process here.

After a month-and-a-half of planning, we’ve finally set a date and a venue. I expect that this was probably the most difficult decision we had to make. Two of the places we seriously considered were the Marvimon in Chinatown, and the Castle Green in Pasadena. I’ll say straight out that the Marvimon was our favorite of all the venues we toured. It was originally built to showcase automobiles in the early twentieth century. The owners found it and converted it into a loft, tearing out parts of the roof to reveal beautiful wooden rafters, and the whole roof entirely in the back to create an enclosed garden. The space was so intimate and unique, classic and historical yet modern and hip. It best matched our tastes and personalities more than anywhere else. The problem was the price (at $5,500 plus additional necessary clean up, staffing, and valet costs it was our most expensive option) and the capacity. It could really only hold about 120 seated, and Bronwyn and I have big families. Our guest list will probably approach the 150 to 200 range. Additionally, while the venue and atmosphere match who we are, there was concern over whether our numerous relatives would be comfortable there, seeing as it’s located in a more downtown and urban place than some would be comfortable with.

The Castle Green would’ve been slightly cheaper than the Marvimon, and in the more tourist-friendly Pasadena. While it didn’t have exactly the same hip vibe that the Marvimon had, its Moorish and Spanish architecture and interior design are extremely charming and unique, which we dug a lot. Most importantly, we’d be able to host all of our guests. We liked it, but we weren’t absolutely madly in love with it like we were with the Marvimon. So the question then was whether or not we spend all this money on something with which we weren’t 100%.

What we finally ended up doing was choosing to go with our mutual alma mater, Pomona College. We only finalized this decision a few days ago and I’ve been increasingly satisfied ever since. To be honest, at first we tossed around the Pomona idea jokingly. We’re still rather fresh graduates, I in ‘04 and her in ‘06, so the idea of heading back to school felt too soon. But the more we thought about it, the better an idea it seemed and it soon became one of our top three choices. First off, we both have personal connections to the place. It’s where we met and it’s where we spent four years of our lives. The place where we would have the reception is the school’s ballroom which is where we spent A LOT of time (we were both on the ballroom dance team). We could even do school-related inside-jokey stuff, like ride off in a “Just Married” golf cart. Second, it’s an extremely beautiful campus. Living there for so long day-in and day-out, one almost forgets that. Third, it is DIRT CHEAP. Seriously. To book the ballroom, all one needs to do is pay for catering, which is $45-$50 a heard. That’s pretty much industry standard for catering alone most other places. At Pomona, the price includes venue, tables, chairs, linens, and flatware. Right there we saved ourselves $5000.

Oddly enough, Pomona being so affordable made it less desirable than the Castle Green for the longest time. At least in my head, I had the silly idea that because we’d be paying much less it wouldn’t be quite as impressive an extravaganza. Truth is, that’s bullcrap. It sounds stupid now saying it out loud, but that’s essentially what I was feeling and that kind of thinking is a product of the wedding industry machine that encourages couples to spend, spend, spend to make things “perfect.” It’s an influence we’ve both been trying to avoid, but it’s something that’s not hard not to get swept up by.

Not until we had received some very sage advice was I able to get over this. Basically, one needs to really prioritize what’s important. We could spend our money to choose some fantastic, elegant, chic, exotic locale, or we could spend the money on, say, traveling around Europe for two months. What’s more important? Some people do want the fantasy wedding and that’s fine. Me and Bronwyn? We want the traveling.

This put other things in perspective, too. We want our wedding to be special, memorable, and fun (emphasis on the fun), but in the end it’s just one day, perfection is impossible, and memories don’t come with a price tag. A place is just a place and a wedding is not about a place, it’s about bringing people together to share in a moment.

So there we go. The wedding is at the end of May. If we can just keep focused with a healthy dose of perspective everything should be smooth sailing from here on out, right? I guess we’ll find out.

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