Harrison Chad and Charlotte Marks, a couple in Park Slope in Brooklyn, have been guests at numerous weddings. Their takeaway was that the traditional structure — a rehearsal dinner the first night and the ceremony and reception the next — was flawed.
It seemed to them that many brides and grooms couldn’t be present or relax until the ceremony was over.
“There is so much pressure building up to the day of your wedding,” said Mr. Chad, 32, who runs social-emotional learning programs in camps around the country. “At the rehearsal dinner and then all day before the wedding, people are asking the groom, ‘How are you? How are you holding up? Are you ready?’ It’s a lot.”
They also noticed that guests regularly seem to overdo it the first evening. “I’ve been to so many weddings where people go all out at the rehearsal dinner because they are so excited and so jazzed to celebrate,” said Ms. Marks, 32, who runs an education startup.
So for their wedding weekend, taking place at the end of this month, they’re changing things around.
The couple are hosting the ceremony and reception the first night, a Thursday, at a Japanese restaurant in the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn for 172 people. “It’s the whole thing: the ceremony, the cocktail hour, the dinner, the speeches, the dances, the hora,” Mr. Chad said.
Then a group of 50 friends will travel to Wylder Hotel Windham, a resort in the Catskill Mountains, for a wedding weekend that will begin with what the couple calls a Friday “rehearsal-dinner-like event,” complete with roasts and toasts.
“We are going to be able to relish and savor this special night in our lives, and then have this full weekend to really be present with our people,” Ms. Marks said. “We feel like we are giving ourselves the greatest gift.”
They are among many who are restructuring the formula of the traditional wedding weekend by having the formal ceremony and reception first and then the smaller, more casual events on subsequent days.
Some choose this schedule to get the most stressful part of the weekend over first. Others find it cheaper to book weddings earlier in the week (such as on a Thursday or Friday).
“The generation that is getting married right now and the one coming up are not interested in playing by the rules,” said Amy Shack Egan, a wedding planner in New York City.
Sara Landon, a planner on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, tries to convince every couple to have the wedding ceremony first. She said she has seen so many couples and families who are unable to enjoy their rehearsal dinners because they have to be up at 9 a.m. for hair and makeup the next day or because they are panicking about speaking or standing before a huge body of people.
Couples who have made this decision cherish the time it gave them to relax.
Caitlyn Chilelli, 29, a teacher, and Zach Chilelli, 29, who works in real estate, live in Westchester County, N.Y., and wanted a destination wedding over a June weekend in Montauk, N.Y. But they realized early in the planning process that if they married on Saturday, which is more traditional, they would have no time to relax with guests before departures on Sunday.
So the couple opted to hold their wedding at a church on a Friday afternoon and their evening reception at Solé East, a leafy resort in Montauk. “This way, Saturday would be very chill,” Ms. Chilelli said.
With the wedding behind them, they spent Saturday with their guests eating breakfast at Goldberg’s, having a barbecue by the pool, going to the Montauket at sunset and then dancing all night in a local dive bar. “My husband spent so much time in the pool the day after our wedding with his cousins, I thought he would turn into a raisin,” she said, laughing. “But this is exactly the day we wanted.”
Ms. Chilelli loved that she had time to talk about the wedding with her friends. “It reminded me of those times when you go out with your friends and you have a debrief the next day,” she said. “We talked about the band, we talked about the food, we talked about the venue.”
“The entire time I was just able to laugh about any hiccups that happened the night before,” she added.
Erin Frankel, 41, who owns a wellness company, and Mat Rotenberg, 37, a founder of a legal software company, chose to marry on a Thursday because that was one of the few dates still available at Gurney’s, an oceanside resort in Montauk, for next summer.
The couple, who have a 3-month-old baby, realized they already did things out of the traditional order. “So our wedding is really mimicking how we are doing things in our lives,” she said.
Now, they are joking, they should do everything “backward,” Ms. Frankel said. “I told my husband we should go on our honeymoon this winter, and we could go on our bachelor and bachelorette parties next summer,” she said. “After our weddings.”
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