This is going to be a very long post describing all the details of my wedding to Rachel on June 10, 2023. It is primarily a time capsule for myself so that I can look back and remember all the queer and nerdy joy that I felt that day, but I also wanted to link to the vendors and music that we used, because literally everything was so perfect and I would be happy for anyone to copy our ideas!
The Venue
We got married at Minnekhada Lodge and stayed at PoCo Inn & Suites because the hotel offered shuttle service to the venue for us and our guests.
The venue was absolutely gorgeous with dark wood and cozy lodge vibes. An added and extremely valued benefit was that the space was already beautiful, so we didn’t have to pay for or plan for any decorations. Literally the only decor we bought was a bundle of flowers from Safeway for $80 that we split into my wedding bouquet and two vases to mark gift and favor tables. As someone who has no natural talent for decorating, this was a massive relief.
The Photographer
Tristen from Wander West Photography did our pictures throughout the day. We had already worked with her for our engagement photos and knew she had the chill but detailed vibes that we wanted during our wedding. She was excellent at pointing out small changes to postures or poses and worked quickly to get great photos before we ran out of energy.
The Ceremony
We asked our friends John and Karen to be our officiants, and they did an AMAZING job of creating a ceremony that combined humor and sincerity. I felt like Rachel and I, and our relationship together, was fully represented. I got so many compliments on their behalf that this was the most authentic wedding ceremony they had ever attended, which is exactly the vibe I wanted to create.
We also prioritized our nerdiness in our music choices that included Lord of the Rings, Spirited Away, and Star Wars. And Rachel had the idea to end the ceremony with the phrase “Roll initiative!” as we walked away as wives into the adventure of marriage, which I have to say is just *chef’s kiss*.
Entrance Music
Wedding Party Entrance: Itsumo Nando Demo (From “Spirited Away”)
Bridal Entrance: LOTR Concerning Hobbits Shire Orchestral
The Story
We feel so honoured to be here ourselves. Rachel and Tricia have asked us to officiate today’s ceremony, during which they will transform before your very eyes … from girlfriends … into wives!
We’ll start with The Story. Rachel and Tricia asked us to tell a tale of their meeting and their early relationship.
So let us part the veils of reality! … flashing back to 2018 when we met Tricia as Rachel’s eligible and beautiful friend with whom Rachel was … [check notes] … not romantically involved?
Huh. Seemed odd to us, and it turns out there was some ambiguity behind the scenes as well … A meetup dot com get together at the Storm Crow Tavern, two nerdy women looking for friendship in the big city and Tricia was … TWENTY MINUTES LATE.
Record scratch!
Their obvious compatibility quickly smoothed over this initial misstep, and opened the door to hours spent in intimate and nerdy conversation, with brunches sliding into excited afternoons brainstorming over laptops and then, well, we might as well get dinner. Sure, it was fun to find someone excited about the same hobbies. But more than that, it was the exhilaration of sharing their pleasure in the things that they love. Tricia began to giddily tell her friends that she had a “friendship crush.” Oh wait … this might be an actual crush. Rachel, we are told, was in “willful blindness” mode and thought, gee, how nice to have found such a funny, thoughtful, intelligent new friend.
My favourite story from this part of the relationship is really delightful; something was missed at some point during one of these long, luxurious days spent together. Was it a… failed perception check…? A failed attempt to persuade…? We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that one happy day, Rachel invited Tricia for a walk in the moonlight, by the water.
I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING RIGHT. Tricia was thinking that too. This Is IT! I can just see the gleam in Tricia’s eye yes I DO want to go for a walk, in the moonlight, by the water, on this beautiful evening, with you. Heart eyes.
And of course Rachel thought, great! This is a normal thing to do with one’s entirely platonic friend. Water? I like it. Walking? It’s good exercise! Moonlight, well it happens to be evening.
So yes there was a walk and a moon and there was water… and there was NO KISSING.
Finally, Tricia decided to lay her cards on the table. She asked Rachel out on a date. And Rachel … [checks notes] … turned her down?? Boy, this romance really did succeed against all odds.
The truly remarkable part is that somehow, this rejected overture didn’t make things awkward. They stayed close friends for the ensuing year, making it through a major fight over [checks notes??] … Stoicism.
[Stoicism? The ancient Greek school of thought emphasizing the practice of virtue and acceptance of hardship and mortality?]
Yes! This ancient philosophy caused a rift during which they did not speak for three weeks! … actually, that tracks.
Of course, we know where this story leads us, through building community and sharing experience, an accumulation of quality time, that concrescence of moments in a trajectory that builds inevitably to I love you. Or, if the profession of love feels a bit too scary (as it initially did for Rachel and Tricia), announcing that one would like to make a “meaningful statement” … and leaving it at that.
What is so delightful and appealing about this couple is that Rachel and Tricia are conscious and deliberate in their ways of being partners to one another. They are so clear-eyed in asking each other: “What do you want?” and making it so. They are so agentic in their approach to marriage – we’re talking about marriage now, not just partnership! – in a way that we think is so terribly wise. This is something beautiful to behold that truthfully we didn’t fully realize until Rachel and Tricia approached us to officiate their wedding, sat us down, and shared with us their philosophy of marriage. As if such a thing were obvious, a philosophy of marriage, but when you think about and listen to this couple, of course! This is Rachel and Tricia, joyous, delightful, hilarious, awake.
So, now we’re getting serious. We’re going to talk about love.
Love is inseparable from creativity, and loving is an act of creation. When we allow love to spark, then coax and nourish and protect it to full, flourishing maturity, something new is created. So while we often hear that, in love, two become one, perhaps we can also say that two become three: you, me, and us.
In other words, love does not diminish the universe, but expands it. Where once it had the pleasure of containing a Rachel and a Tricia, the universe now also contains something new. A Rachel, a Tricia, and a Trachea.
The bringing forth of something new, something that wasn’t there before – I’m no fantasy expert, but does that not sound suspiciously like … magic? Love is magic. And Rachel and Tricia are magicians.
bell hooks has written,
When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.
She goes on to say that to embrace love is to face our fears, to live courageously. And marriage vows do require courage. After all, humans are mercurial creatures – we are forever growing, changing, learning. When we vow to spend our lives loving each other, we are, as Judith Butler has observed, “committing ourselves in the face of the unknowable.” Butler continues: “If commitment is to be alive, that is, if it is to belong to the present, then the only commitment one can make is to commit oneself again and again. ‘I love you and I choose you again and again.’”
A vow of marriage is not a commitment to the person standing in front of us, exactly as they are, forever and ever. It a commitment to witnessing and loving their changing self. It is a commitment to journeying together, whatever twists and turns the road may offer. It is a promise to stay curious, present, open-hearted, compassionate, and by our beloved’s side.
The Vows
Based upon the vows spoken by Paula and Blanca, the first legalized same-sex marriage in Canada in 2001.
“I take you to be my wife from this moment on. I promise to be there for you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honour you. I vow to give and receive, to speak and to listen, to inspire and respond, to respect and to cherish, and to work with you to achieve the goals and dreams of our lives.
For evsies and for realsies.“
Exit Music
“That’s it! You’re married. This is the beginning. Roll for initiative!”
Bridal Exit: Star Wars Main Title
Afternoon Tea
After the ceremony and photographs, we served an afternoon tea to our guests as the main food served at our wedding. Rachel and I love afternoon teas, and splurging on that experience is one of our favorite ways to take in a new city. At a wedding expo, we saw an advertisement for an afternoon tea delivery vendor, which led us to try a couple and land on Sattea Mobile Tea Boutique.
Sattea was wonderful to work with, generous and accommodating. We had a few guests who were either vegetarian or gluten free, and the vendor served guest-specific meals as necessary with no trouble at all.
Like the venue itself, our choice of serving afternoon tea also meant that we didn’t have to plan table decorations, as Sattea provided tablecloths, flowers and vases, and the requisite teacups and tiered trays filled the space nicely.
The one thing we did add to the tables were board games that served to direct guests to their assigned table. For instance, we put Rails & Sails on our parents’ table, because both Rachel’s dad and my dad are train nerds. It was a simple choice that also boosted our nerdy vibes.
Murder Mystery
By far, the thing I heard most both before and after our wedding was excitement about our murder mystery reception. Quite right, too, since it was an absolute highlight. Rachel and I love to host murder mystery parties at our apartment, and we had already fallen in love with Foulplay Games when we met the two women who run the small business at Emerald City Comic Con. On a whim, I reached out to Maddy and Kristen and asked if they could create a game for 50 guests. They adapted one of their already existing games, adding characters and fleshing out plotlines, and the end result was awesome.
I asked my brother to handle every aspect of the murder mystery, so Rachel and I got to fully participate without responsibility. The two of us had a full costume change, and the majority of our guests brought props or costumes to fit into the 1919 carnival-themed game. One guest was murdered by a lion, and there was a balloon lion with Sharpie-added aggression to mark the grisly event. We spent two hours chatting, bribing, and trying to solve the murder before voting on the most likely candidate. I won’t spoil anything about the story, but I will say that I won for Best Costume and Rachel won for Best Performance; I’m sure us being the brides didn’t tip the voting scales in our favour!
If including a murder mystery in your wedding sounds fun to you at all, I highly recommend it. While our guests chatted with the tablemates during afternoon tea, this game got everyone up and talking to people they may never have met otherwise. It’s a helpful icebreaker for introverts, as your character sheet gives you individual goals and people to seek out, so you have a reason to strike up a conversation. And for the remaining three hours of our reception, people had something to talk about and share; the only “downside” was that a lot of people only remember guests by their characters’ names!
Cake and Prophesied Doom
By now, you can probably tell that we chose some fairly untraditional routes for our wedding, and we continued this theme when it came to cakes. Because we served a variety of sweets with afternoon tea, it seemed excessive to spend $500 (minimum!!) on a traditional wedding cake. Instead, we bought our favorite cakes from True Confections: mine was their chocolate Birthday Cake (listen, I don’t care about mixing celebrations, I die for this cake), and Rachel’s was their Dark Belgian Chocolate Mousse (which was conveniently gluten free).
Before I share our cake photo, a little background story: The Tuesday before our wedding we were playing D&D with our regular group, and I asked the oracle character to foretell our wedding using the dice-rolling mechanics she had made up. In addition to some good news, she warned us that there would be “technical failures” and that kids would not enjoy the day. This turned into the greatest gift, because whenever something went slightly wrong, we would loudly complain about the “The prophesied doom is upon us!” This had a lovely way of bringing laughter into stressful situations.
Okay, so the cake. Our Master of Ceremonies, our dear friend Tabitha, forewarned me that the cake had fallen just before it was brought out for our whiskey toast. Rachel and I were delighted! We set the D&D figurines that we’d brought as cake toppers (Irina and Szoldar, the Curse of Strahd characters that we played and through whom Rachel proposed to me) on the fallen cake layers as though they were climbing a mountain and told the audience about the prophesied doom. Everyone laughed, the cake was still delicious, and the night went on.
All the Rest
Some other things that I loved about our wedding in no particular order:
- We set out a Polaroid camera for people to take photos, and some of the ones I grabbed are amongst my favorite mementos of the day.
- I ordered my dress from JessaKae and felt like an actual princess. It was a little long and I probably should have gotten it altered, but it twirled SO GOOD and that was what was important for me.
- Rachel looked really good in her suit, but she hated the fitting experience, so I will not link to the company that made it. If you want to chat wedding suits for female bodies, send me an email and we’ll talk!
- We had planned for the last few hours of our wedding to be a board game reception, and there were a couple games that happened, but happily by then, our guests were mingling and chatting and uninterested in thinking strategy.
- Our favours were an stolen from my friend Mallory’s wedding. We picked a diverse bunch of our favorite books and let guests choose one to take home with them. We also had rainbow-coloured notebooks and stickers that used the artwork our friend Milo created that show Rachel and me as D&D characters.
- We had an abundance of wine and beer at our wedding, and we wound up needing only half of it. A lot was sent home with guests as additional favours, and we still have enough to host a Pride party in August.
- Speaking of Pride, I did the math, and our guest list was fully two-thirds queer. One of my friends who has only recently come out told me how safe and sweet it was to be in a majority-queer space, and I am not trying to convince her to move to Vancouver!
I could not have asked for a more perfect wedding day. I’m currently riding that post-wedding high where all of the preparatory stress feels distant and unimportant, and I figure I should throw 10-hour parties for 50 people on a regular basis! I probably won’t, but I’m really proud of the wedding Rachel and I put together. It represented who we are as individuals and as a team, and I came away from the day with a lot of lovely memories AND A WIFE.
Roar Cat Reads 
Leave a reply to Pat Adams Cancel reply