Making a wedding: A good location is a good location is a good location

Our final location, the Parkgaststätte in Leipzig. Photo by Mario Reizig

When I first read up on how to plan a wedding, step one was always: One year before the wedding, you should find a venue.
Now I am lucky enough to live in a city with dozens of suitable venues and something for every taste. So far, so good. Planning with 70 people (including me and my future husband plus people like the photographer and the DJ) didn't sound too unreasonable too. So I started extra early and googled for locations and started sending out inquiries about the conditions. My checklist for a good venue included that it had to be within a good range of public transport (because most of my guests don't have a car), ideally also within range of hotels (because most guests will be from out of town), big enough to seat 70 people and still have a dance floor, of course somewhat pretty (but I was open about what kind of pretty) and I wanted it to be possible to have my mum do a cocktail bar. As a little background info: My mum is not a huge fan of weddings and is happy when she has something to do and isn't forced to do small talk with anyone. Also she makes awesome cocktails, so it's really a win-win situation.

I had one location specifically in mind that, from photos, I liked a lot. But when they answered, I think my jaw dropped a bit: While the cocktail bar thing was not possible (so they couldn't meet our wants), they would have cost 9000 Euros. That is almost our entire budget. And I did have that problem with more than one location. So alternatives had to be found.
It was also my mum who suggested a venue in her area that seemed to be perfect: Pretty, close to public transport and a few hotels, the cocktail bar was no problem and it was well within our budget - actually, it was way below out budget, so thats a good thing.

Or would be, if it wasn't so complicated to get an appointment for visiting it first. I inquired first in late April. They said visits were possible from Monday to Friday from 10am to 2pm. If I was to plan a birthday party for myself or something like that, I could have made those hours either on one of my days I have off during the week in excharge of working Saturdays or during a day where I have a late shift, but since this is our wedding, it is important to me that my fiance and I get to do this together, make a decision together etc., especially because he will pay the lions share of this wedding and even if he wasn't, he is very good at keeping my enthusiam and impulsiveness contained. After all, he is the Ben Wyatt to my Leslie Knope (insert "Awwwww!"). The thing is, my fiance works in that time span and the next time he would have had some days off were in June. I explained that to the guy on the phone and he said he could give me an appointment for a later hour in late May.

May comes, the day comes, and a few hours before the appointment, he calls and cancels - because the room is booked in that time. Who could have known earlier? I am not exactly thrilled about this, but we move the appointment to two weeks later. Two weeks later comes, this time, he at least calls me a few days before the appointment - and cancels again because he and his boss have to go get a donations check for their organisation. This time, I am angry. Its not that the appointment has to be cancelled, it is that it has to be cancelled because of absolutely preventable things and bad planning. If they cancelled because someone got sick or something like that, that would have been perfectly fine. So I tell him that yes, we can move the appointment one more time, but if that third appointment gets cancelled again, we're out. While I mean it as just telling things the way they are, he understands it as a threat and tells me that someone else is interested in renting the room for that date as well (which I already know) and brings up the lamest argument ever that he had brought up several times before already: "I told you you could come Monday to Friday from 10 to 2, I mean, how do you handle dentists appointments with that attitude?" And then I basically held a speech on the phone to him: I am a grown up woman and can handle dentists appointments very well without my fiance, thus, all I need to line up is my calender and the dentists calender. For this, I need three schedules to work together. If I was doing this on my own, I could do 10 to 2, but I am not marrying myself - I am marrying a guy who propably would like to have this wedding to his liking as well. And the reason we can't do Monday to Friday 10 to 2 is that we are working during that time which is necessary to earn the money that is necessary to pay for renting a room, and for the first appointment I already took a day off so I could make the appointment which then was cancelled, so maybe you can understand that by now, we are pretty worn down and if the third appointment doesn't happen again, we will have had enough of waiting. So this will be next week, 5pm?

After I hung up I was shaking a lot because I really held myself back from saying a lot of things that would have blown every chance of us ever renting that room. Also, I felt like a suburban soccer mum and I hated it. But the other option would have been to be a pushover and not say anything about this, right? So I had a cigarette, and then I searched for alternatives because I wasn't too sure about that room anymore. If I even still wanted to have our party there after all this. I inquired for a few other locations and made an appointment to visit another one the day before the final appointment for the first room. Everything was so smooth with the new alternative: A 5pm appointment was no problem, no one cancelled, we got there, they guy who showed us around got there, the quote he offered us wasn't too much higher than the other one, the only downsides were that the location was a bit further away from public transport and in another style than I originally wanted, but I could work with this. The next day, we actually got to see the room. It was less pretty than I thought it would be from the photos, it would have been a problem to fit all our guests in there, we would have to put a lot of extra work and organisation into making it fit our wishes... so we chose the alternative. So after all, the guy from the first location just postponed us opting out of renting that room by 1,5 months. He could have gotten that earlier.

After all this fuss with the first location, I am actually positively surprised how well everything went with the second one. Sure, we did have some waiting for replies because they were busy with graduation parties at the time, but apart from that the communication was perfect. So this is step 1 set for planning our big day - if everything else goes a bit more smoothly, things are going to be just fine!

Making a wedding: I'm a strong independent woman who... can't ask

So, as I mentioned since November - I am engaged.
No worries, this is not going to become a wedding blog or something, but I figured I'd really like to share my experiences along the way of planning a wedding, especially as someone who a) is a feminist and b) is a big fan of doing things differently and (hopefully) less expensive.
First of all, let me tell you: When I was a child, I was not a big fan of weddings and marriage in general. I had grown up in a family where a lot of people were divorced or didn't get married in the first place mostly because of that history of divorce. My family is pretty matriarchal due to that as well, because its the mothers (grandmothers, aunts, you name it) who usually stayed part of the family. My mum never married and always told me that she thinks that love doesn't need a wedding. And you know what? I still think she is right.

However, the older I got, the more I started dreaming of having this huge party. I like to celebrate love, and I like to break standards. So why not throw this huge party with someone you love? Sure, you could do it without the ceremony and all that fuss and without the comitment that comes with marriage. But that'd be only half the deal, right?

So generally, I'd like to get married for the experience which might be a pretty millenial approach, but here we go. The biggest problem about this is - I am also not big at long-term relationships. The half-life for my relationships is usually around 4 months. Not exactly a great basis for getting married.
Then I met my fiance. To be honest, this relationship started out like an experiment, I was by then pretty sure that I was more of a polyamorous person, he knew that he wanted monogamy - so basically the deal was "We try the monogamy thing, and see if it works for me and if not, we have a calm, mature talk about it and see what we can do about it or if we break up because it doesn't fit (which would be perfectly fine too)". So basically we did what should be the standard: Commiting to communicate. What can I say - so far, we didn't have any talk like this yet, mostly because this guy trusts me a lot and there is zero jealousy because of that. He trusts me that if I have urges I want to follow I will be honest with him, and he believes that if that happens, it just doesn't work and that would be ok too. So basically we are both very calm, not stressing out about the future too much and enjoying our time together. We are not the type for "forever" but more for "for now as long as it makes us happy" and thats great. And "for now" has lasted for 3 years already.
We had talked about our mutual wish to get married for pretty long already before there was an actual proposal, so we both knew that as long as we stayed together we'd both be in - not necessarily at any given time, but just in general.

After two and a half years, in October 2017, we moved in together for the first time and to me, it really felt like this was a huge milestone and at the same time a test to our relationship. Living with someone else is something I am not very good at either - I get easily annoyed by people when I need time on my own and past shared living situations showed that my idea of tidiness and others ideas of tidiness usually differ a lot. However, after a month, we still were absolutely chill with each other and when there were problems we managed to (boom, here it goes again) talk them out peacefully.
Now at the end of the month, something happened that made me really angry of my fiance (for the sake of the privacy of everyone involved we agreed not to disclose that any further on here - don't worry, while it was a pretty big deal to me, it wasn't something inherently toxic or even dangerous). Of course he apologized, but I still had a hard time swallowing what happened that evening.
The next day, I was in town for an appointment, and after that was done, I started to wander around a bit. I really like to do that from time to time, just walking through different shops not really buying anything, no music on my ears, just walking and thinking. And I thought about the last evening and how angry I had been... and somehow I started to randomly look at rings. Not expensive ones, actually really cheap rings. The idea to propose formed and finally I bought a set of rings for 24€ combined, asked the shop assistants for a box to put them into and to wish me luck. Because if after being so angry at him I still didn't spare even a thought to maybe ending the relationship, this was something.

So I had two rings in a box and went home, my heart beating very fast. At home, I didn't really manage to do the thing at first, but at some point, I sat on the couch and he somehow sat on a stool right in front of me which was pretty ideal, so I put the box in front of him and told him I brought something. He opened it, got all teary-eyed and started to grin like an idiot and kissed me and finally I asked "So, what do you say?" and he replied "Well, you haven't asked anything yet." It dawned on me that he was right, I hadn't. I propably blushed and went "I... I can't say it!" because it felt so weird to even think about saying those words out loud: Do you want to marry me?
So even while it was pretty awkward he did say yes, and I still like to end this story with the notion that it could all be a huge misunderstanding - because no one ever actually asked the question.
(By the way, he planned on proposing as well, wanted to do it on my birthday two weeks later.)