Let’s Cut the Cake is our newest series on AJ and I planning our own wedding as a pair of wedding photographers! Over the next year, we’ll be sharing our process and inviting you in on our decision making and witnessing trial + errors! It’s called Let’s Cut the Cake because that’s what AJ and I will be doing on May 16th, 2020!! Can’t wait to have you all along on this crazy long, messy path that is actually planning a wedding.

Today we’re talking about how we’re going about planning during a two year long engagement!

Why We’re Choosing a Long Engagement

Honestly I can’t believe it’s been a year of us saying, “Well, it’s not til, 2020 so we have some time!”

When you first get engaged there are a million things that go through your head. There are so many decisions ahead of you. So many things you feel like you have to do right now.

I think being in the industry and knowing really how crazy planning a wedding really is made me want to slow things down.

The first decision we made was that we didn’t want to make any decisions for a while.

We decided it was important for us to just to soak up this time as fiancés. I mean, I had wanted to call AJ my fiancé for years.

You have no idea how badly I used to pine for this back in college.

I wanted so badly to rush things, move things ahead at any cost. I felt so insecure our relationship (long distance will do that to you…) that I just wanted anything to feel more rooted, more legitimate.

I wish I could have looked past that insecurity to see what we really were and recognize that good things take time.

I have learned now that our relationship (like most things in my life), is a slow burn. It’s something you cannot rush. Something you can’t move ahead or stay stuck in the past. I’ve learned to let go and learn patience, and have faith in us. Because we have gone through so much in the past eight years, there’s just nothing we can’t get through.

So when is actual date, you might be asking…

Back in college when I did want everything to speed up, one time AJ casually mentioned that our anniversary was on a Saturday in 2020. And I remember thinking “2020??? That’s eons away from right now. Please let it be before then!”

If I had only known that settling into our adult lives would be such an important step, I wouldn’t have wanted to rush it.

Especially after seeing so many weddings over the last few years, our wedding has become just a stepping stone in my mind. We are already very much adults (we have a mortgage now, what’s more adult than that?) and have always been completely committed to each other.

So while our wedding will be a huge milestone in our relationship, it’s not going to mark a point of progress (if that makes sense!) Our relationship is always going to be evolving, ebbing and flowing, and our wedding day is going to be a celebration of how far we’ve come and what our future holds. It’s not going to be a sign of commitment or of a shift in the way things have always been.

In short, our wedding will simply be a celebration of our love story.

So here we are, the actual perfect date is 2 years away.

And do we wait? Yes we do. Let me tell you why.

For starters, I’m just extremely attached to May 16th.

Imagine your birthday, it’s a day that will always stick out in your head. Any random thing can be happening on that day, whether in the future or the past, and you think “Oh that’s my birthday!!”

May 16th is like that for me. It will always be the day I convinced this too-cute-for-me sophomore to make things official.

I promise we didn’t just hang out for a year and put off all planning until now. Or wait, did we?

Here’s what we’ve got so far:

We have picked our venue, our planner, photographer, and booked our band! All things that are in high demand, or are essential to plan a wedding.

And I have a whole year to dive into all of these things.

But most importantly, we have the date. Obviously.

365 days from now AJ and I will be waking up on our wedding day. So let the countdown begin.

If you’re married or about to be married, did you have a long engagement? What was/will be your wedding day to you? Tell me in the comments below!