Because our couples are often better writers than we are, we’ll just quote Stephen:

“Sometimes the best things in life, the best moments, are the ones you don’t plan and just work. I think this is one of those situations. Relationships are important to Katelyn and I, as are dynamics. We really appreciated meeting both of you [spontaneaously over coffee and crepes at Bradbury’s the morning of a wedding we would both be at!] and we think you two are sweet, professional and we value your approach. We are really put off by the “wedding-industrial complex” and feel as though working with you two would be back to human relationships and not just a commodity market.”

Oh my goodness, we’re so glad we didn’t plan this and it just worked (if you count them changing their date for us as something that “just worked”! What?!).

That wedding was Kristen and Alex’s at Folklore Village. We met Stephen and Katelyn the night before, at the rehearsal dinner at Marigold Kitchen in Madison, then again over breakfast the next morning before any of us had to be anywhere. A year later we were at Moon Mountain Lodge in Washington, photographing theirs.

They’d been friends for twelve years before a camping trip to the Doe Bay festival in 2010 turned it into something else. Stephen’s hope for the day was that nobody would just come, see them, have a drink and go, that their friends and families who mostly didn’t know each other would leave knowing each other. That’s a harder thing to plan for than a timeline, and it mostly comes down to how long you give people.

Katelyn wanted the ceremony to carry the weight, to honor the relationship in its actual complexity and the people who had loved them separately and then together. And she wanted to be present for the rest of it, which she was honest about being the hard part. Her words: “So many logistics and expectations, sheesh.” That’s the tension every couple is holding on a wedding day, and we’ve rarely heard it put more plainly.

These two and their entire wedding day can be summed up with the definition of joy:

a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.