Thoughts on Marriage

Kyle and I got married on August 21, 2011. We were engaged for only a week and told our parents that we were getting married on my birthday which is August 17^th. We got married in an untraditional fashion. Many people may disagree with what we did or think that we were selfish. We did have a wedding celebration a couple of weeks later so that our parents could meet and we could celebrate with them. This is what Kyle had to say:

“Marriage, to me, is a way for two people who are in love to show the rest of the world that they have chosen to commit their lives to each other. It is a decision that the two people involved should make for themselves as something to do if and when they are ready. While a married couple can share their lives with friends and family, the decisions that determine how their relationship to one another will progress should be made by the couple themselves. This is how I see marriage; two people deciding for themselves how to live their lives as individuals and as a couple. I am a non-traditionalist meaning that I rarely do something simply because it’s a tradition. The act of wedding two people in front of a large crowd in an extravagant ceremony is how marriages traditionally begin. Many young girls are said to dream of their wedding day since a young age, but the stress and high cost of today’s weddings would probably be avoided by more than a few couples if they were bold enough to break tradition. Colorado is one of the only states that allows a couple to solemnize, or officiate, their own wedding process. This means that no judge, priest, or captain of a ship is required to make a marriage “official”. The wedding couple is allowed to make their own marriage “official”. For this reason Erica and I hiked into Lake Haiyaha in Rocky Mountain National Park on August 21, 2011 and solemnized our own wedding. We hiked into the lake (possibly the longest bridal march in history) an engaged couple and hiked out as a married couple. We chose to do this to avoid the high cost and stress of planning an extravagant ceremony and to symbolize the fact that the course of marriage will be controlled by us as a couple from the wedding process until death does its part. We don’t wish to criticize or condemn others who wish to have a traditional wedding ceremony, we just wanted to explain what we are doing and why.”

We are both happy that we did not start our marriage in debt. We believe that our money could go to better things like travel rather than decorations and dresses. We also did not want to spend a lot of money. Kyle did not get an engagement ring for me. Instead, we bought wood rings after we got married. Instead of calling them our wedding rings we call them our marriage rings. We decided to get wooden rings for ethical reasons. Many diamonds go through sweat shops. Also, the workers mining diamonds in Africa don’t receive fair wages. We got wood rings because they are unique. We went through a company called touchwoodrings. It is a couple running the business. The husband makes the rings and the wife does the administrative work. They live in British Columbia. The wood they get is from downed trees, bug killed trees or scrap wood.