I just got married!

My wife and I shared a beautiful wedding weekend in California.

I have some news to share that I hope excuses my five-week hiatus from this blog.

My now-wife and I just got married at the end of July.

It was a perfect wedding.

Kayt and I celebrated with loved ones near my hometown of Thousand Oaks, California over three events in three days — a “white-out” welcome party, the wedding, and a day-after brunch.

A true canon event, relatives traveled from Hong Kong, Germany, England, Canada and all over the US to share the special moment with us.

Now that we’re on the other side of the wedding, I can confirm the rumors are true: Nothing is as painstakingly detail-heavy as planning a wedding.

That’s particularly true for one stretched across multiple events, organized from across the country, and squeezed into a six-month timeline instead of the typical 12 to 18.

Like most worthwhile ambitions, planning a wedding requires going through hell to reach heaven. It demands its pound of flesh.

For us this manifested as an endless deluge of vendor contracts, color-coded spreadsheets, and logistical headaches that our day jobs forced us to relegate to late nights and weekends.

That’s the funny thing about planning a wedding.

You work extremely hard to create a celebration of love, yet the months leading up to it test your patience, communication and — yes — love for one another more than anything else to that point.

I’ve now only been married for two weeks, but I feel confident enough to say that planning a wedding offers a sort of compressed crash-course on marriage itself.

In both contexts, individual preferences have to come to terms with shared priorities.

You have to make many thousand decisions with your partner — some trivial, some expensive, others mind-numbing — and in the process you learn that each decision itself is secondary to ensuring you arrive at every conclusion as one team.

The budget conversations weren’t really about numbers, just as the seating chart wasn’t really about chairs.

As it happens, it was in planning the wedding that I found the words for the vows I shared standing at the altar with my wife.

The whole process has put the two of us through a special kind of temporary, necessary chaos, which brought with it a lesson in essentialism.

Bandwidth limitations filtered out what wasn’t necessary to the mission of the wedding — a lesson I suspect will prove useful over the course of a very long marriage.

Phil Rosen
Co-founder & Editor-in-Chief, Opening Bell Daily

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