The morning I married my husband began almost exactly like any other morning in our house. Greg and I already lived together, so there was no waking up in separate hotel rooms or coordinating some dramatic first look later in the day. I made tea. I journaled. I showered and styled my hair. Then I put on a white satin robe and started doing my makeup. Somewhere around that point, it sank in that this was not actually a regular Friday. I do not wear makeup every day, and there was something about sitting there putting my face together that made the whole thing suddenly feel real: I was getting ready to marry my best friend. Greg was still asleep at the time because we had been up late the night before. Men have it way easier.
A few hours later, we would be legally married in Washington, D.C., without a minister, pastor, judge, celebrant or friend ordained online for the occasion. We would eventually stand beneath a tree at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, thank our ancestors, exchange deeply personal vows, put rings on each other’s fingers and jump a broom that usually lives by the front door of our house. Later, we would take wedding portraits at Union Station, attempt to toast ourselves at happy hour and eventually make it back home for an evening that reminded us exactly why we had wanted the day to belong to us in the first place.
When people hear that we self-officiated and spent very little money doing it, I think there is an assumption that we had some stripped-down version of a wedding. There were fewer people, fewer expenses and certainly fewer moving parts, so by conventional wedding math, we must have had less. I do not think we did. We were just ruthless about distinguishing tradition from obligation.
We Decided What Was Ours.
Greg and I started researching elopement pretty early in our relationship. I remember that maybe a month in, he told me he was not going to be the kind of person who waited forever to marry someone once he knew that was what he wanted. Neither of us wanted all the pomp and circumstance of a big wedding anyway, which raised a pretty reasonable question: If we already know we want to be married, exactly what are we waiting for?
That thinking also explains why there was no traditional proposal. There was no engagement period either. Throughout our early relationship, we had already answered some version of “Will you marry me?” many times. Marriage was not a surprise one of us was waiting to spring on the other. It was a decision we were making together, which made the traditional proposal feel more performative than a necessary step in our relationship.
We are both previously divorced, which probably helped us separate the symbolism of a wedding from the choreography of one. I had already done many of the traditional things before, and I did not need to recreate them simply because they were familiar. This time, neither of us was especially interested in anything beyond what it actually took to become husband and wife.
We skipped a lot. We did not spend the night before the wedding apart. There was no rule about Greg seeing me before the ceremony because he had literally watched me get ready in our house. There was no engagement party, bridal party, or processional. My parents were not asked for permission because I was a 37-year-old divorced mother of two, and nobody was transferring custody of me. I belong to myself. We did not need someone standing between us to pronounce us married. My dear friend Jae was invaluable to me during the process, but I did not need to surround myself with bridesmaids to prove I have people who love me.
Once we learned that Washington, D.C. allows couples to officiate their own marriages, it felt like it was for people like us. D.C. law expressly includes “the parties to the marriage” among the people authorized to solemnize a marriage. The D.C. Superior Court describes this as a self-officiating ceremony, meaning one of the people getting married performs the ceremony. For couples choosing that option, both parties must appear in person with valid government-issued identification, and the cost of the marriage-license application fee as $45. Couples can begin the application online, and once a D.C. marriage license is issued, it does not expire.
There was a practical appeal to that, obviously, but our decision was also spiritual. Greg and I share a spiritual practice that does not fit neatly inside one religion, and neither of us wanted somebody else’s beliefs spoken over our union because we were obligated to have an officiant. We did not want to force our marriage into a religious box we do not put it in ourselves. We wanted the things we vowed to each other to actually be the things we vowed to each other, and self-uniting gave us room to treat the marriage as the intimate and spiritual agreement we believe it to be.
The process itself was almost ridiculously simple. We had tried to begin our application online the week before, but we did not receive the confirmation until the night before our wedding. At that point, we figured we might as well handle everything in person since we were going to the courthouse anyway. We showed up with our identification, completed our information, spoke with a clerk and attested that everything we had provided was accurate. When we were asked who would serve as the officiant, Greg did, which means my husband technically married us.
We paid the $45 marriage-license fee and another $10 for a certified copy, which we knew would be useful for name changes and other official business. The Superior Court currently lists certified copies at $10 each. The employees we encountered were also one of the sweetest surprises of the day. Everyone seemed genuinely happy to be working around people getting married, and nobody was unnecessarily sour or bureaucratic about it. They felt like exactly the people you would want working at a Marriage Bureau.
The funniest part is that we handled the paperwork before we held our personal ceremony. We did not want to spend the day running back and forth to the courthouse, so after receiving the documents, we found somewhere to sign everything, went back inside and filed it. By the time we got into the car and headed toward the Sculpture Garden, we were already married. I remember sitting in the car and realizing it. That was my husband. There had been no altar yet, no vows, no broom and no grand announcement, just paperwork, signatures and this new legal fact riding in the car with us.
The Ceremony That Actually Mattered to Us
We did not even wake up that morning knowing for certain that we would get married at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. We had tossed around a few possible D.C. locations that I no longer even remember. After leaving the courthouse, Greg suggested the Sculpture Garden, and that became the place.
For anyone considering a similar D.C. elopement, that is probably my biggest practical recommendation beyond reading the current Marriage Bureau instructions before you go. Have a couple of possible ceremony locations in mind, preferably an indoor and outdoor option in case the weather refuses to respect your plans. The courthouse handles the legality. What you do with the rest of the city can be as elaborate or as simple as you want it to be.
We chose a tree, and our ceremony was less of a production than a beautiful conversation. We began by showing gratitude to our ancestors for making us who we are. We even joked about all the generations of people whose DNA had to cooperate to give us the exact features the other one happens to like. We talked about the importance of what we were doing and then exchanged vows that were personal, passionate and transparent.
I loved being able to say what we wanted without translating ourselves for an audience. There were inside jokes that did not need footnotes. There were feelings we could express without waiting for the inevitable “awww” from a room full of people. There was no damn hooting and hollering every time somebody said something sweet. As much as I love celebration, getting married is still a solemn act, and I wanted us to be able to sit in that seriousness for a minute without performing it.
We still had a little stage fright because these were intimate things to say aloud and we were, technically, standing in a public park. The area was low traffic, though, and the handful of people who passed seemed to understand what was happening. Everyone was considerate, and some congratulated us. Mostly, we got to focus on each other, which may have been the greatest luxury of the entire day.
At my first wedding, I remember how overwhelming it could be to have the attention of an entire room. Everybody at a wedding knows at least one person in the couple, and everybody wants to congratulate you, hug you, talk to you and have their own moment with you. That love is genuine, but it also means that the people getting married can spend a surprising amount of their wedding day interacting with everyone except each other. This time, nobody knew what we were doing, nobody needed us and nobody was waiting for their turn to pull us away. For one day, we were unavailable to everyone except each other.
Despite all the traditions we gladly left behind, there were some I never considered abandoning. I wore white. Maybe white seems strange on a divorced mother of two, not including my bonus daughter, marrying for the second time. I was not interested in white as a declaration of purity. I wore it because I wanted to feel light.
I wore a veil, too, but its meaning to me had little to do with bridal convention. I already cover my head when I pray or intentionally set aside time to speak with God. My wedding felt like that kind of sacred moment on a larger scale, so covering my head felt natural. The veil happened to be a wedding tradition, but it was also mine.
We exchanged rings because of what the circle symbolizes and because a wedding band is one of the few marriage traditions that also functions as useful social shorthand. I am married. There is somebody at home who expects me back. We took wedding photographs because photographs are evidence. Our parents wanted to see them, of course, but I also wanted them because I care deeply about the record we are creating.
Union Station made perfect sense for those portraits because the last time Greg and I had been there together, we had been discussing buying rings so we could get married. We had originally talked about January or October. A weekday opening appeared in our lives and we took it. Walking through Union Station in wedding clothes–months earlier than we had originally imagined–felt like a full-circle moment. We had gone from discussing rings in that space to returning as husband and wife, with a photographer there to document the proof.
We had also decided that happy hour would be our version of a reception. Ted’s Bulletin seemed like a fun, casual place to cap off the public part of the day, and neither of us went in expecting some elaborate fine-dining experience or special treatment because I was wearing white. We were not looking for champagne to magically appear or for the restaurant to turn into a wedding venue on our behalf. We were hoping for decent service, a celebratory drink and maybe a smile from somebody. The bar was not high.
Ted’s still managed to miss it.
The service was bad enough that we both left feeling like we should have gone to Busboys and Poets for happy hour instead. I do not want to give that part of the day more weight than it deserves because, ultimately, it did not have any. Greg and I were still floating inside our newlywed bubble, and a disappointing happy hour was not about to puncture it. We eventually went home and had a beautiful evening together, which felt much more in keeping with the entire spirit of the day anyway. Our wedding had never been about whether strangers could create a special experience for us. We had already created one for ourselves.
Jumping the broom was another tradition I never considered negotiable. The broom was not some pristine wedding prop we bought for pictures. We already had it because we keep a broom by our front door. We decorated it for the wedding, took it with us, jumped over it and brought it back home. There is something about using the broom from our own house that I love. It already belonged to our shared domestic life before our marriage was legal, then we carried it into the ritual that marked our marriage and returned it to the household afterward. That feels like tradition to me.
The history of jumping the broom , according to the version many of us were taught, has close association with Black American wedding traditions and the history of slavery, when marriages between enslaved people generally had no legal standing. Jumping the broom became part of Black American cultural memory and has been embraced by contemporary Black couples as a way to honor the people who came before them.
That history was important to us because our ancestors made families under conditions designed to deny their families legitimacy. Enslaved Black people could love, partner, raise children and create kinship while living within a legal system that often refused to recognize those relationships as marriages. Smithsonian educational material on Reconstruction notes that enslaved African Americans’ marriages were not legally recognized and that jumping the broom was among the ceremonies used to mark unions. After emancipation, legal marriage became one of the rights Black Americans sought to exercise for themselves.
Greg and I stood in Washington, D.C., generations later, legally entitled not only to marry each other but to declare that marriage ourselves, and we still chose to jump the broom. The government had already accepted our paperwork. We did not need the broom to make the marriage legal, and we did not need an ancestral ritual to satisfy the clerk at the courthouse. We needed it because it was ours.
For me, jumping the broom was ancestral, Black American and personal all at once. It was also a reminder that Greg and I get to decide what has meaning in our union. If jumping over that broom marks a threshold for us, then it marks a threshold. We do not need additional pomp to make it sacred.
That may be the biggest thing our wedding taught me about tradition. Tradition is not the same thing as convention. Convention says there is a prescribed order of operations: proposal, engagement, showers, wedding parties, rehearsal dinner, processional, officiant, reception and whatever else a bridal website tells you to add to a checklist. Tradition is the thing people keep because it continues to mean something. Sometimes you inherit it, sometimes you reinterpret it and sometimes you create something your family may one day inherit from you.
Our parents were present in that way, too. Both sets have August wedding anniversaries, and before we married, Greg’s mother showed me photographs from her wedding. Now there are photographs of ours. Years from now, somebody may look at all of those images together and see continuity where we were simply trying to live our lives. That is the kind of legacy I understand now in a way I did not before.
We went into our wedding interested in almost nothing outside of what it took to get married, yet marriage has already made me think more deeply about all the little objects and rituals that help families understand themselves across generations.
The Wedding Gifts We Actually Want
There are certain things people traditionally give newlyweds that are not really about furnishing a house. They are about beginning a family archive. Because we eloped, we did not have a room full of relatives bringing those things to us. At first, creating a registry afterward felt tacky to me. Then people started asking what they could give us, and we started noticing things we wanted for our household and our future that are normally accumulated through family over time.
We do have a traditional wedding registry, and that registry also connects to our honeymoon fund for anyone who would rather contribute toward experiences and memories than physical things. There is another kind of gift we would love just as much, though, because we are building an archive for this new family and physical records matter to us.
We would love vinyl records and CDs, especially music you believe belongs in a Black family’s music collection. We would love old issues of Jet, Ebony, Essence and other vintage Black magazines that documented our people, art, politics, style, and ordinary lives. Family photographs would mean just as much. Originals are welcome when duplicates exist, and copies are perfect when they do not. We want the weddings, birthdays, cookouts, school pictures, Christmas mornings, graduations and completely uneventful Tuesdays. We also want to know who is in the photographs, where they were taken and what was happening when somebody thought the moment was worth saving.
Blank photo albums and picture frames are also welcome because I do not want every memory our family makes to live behind a password or disappear into a camera roll. I want things we can touch, label, pass around the table, and eventually hand to our children. Physical recordkeeping feels increasingly important in a world where so much of our lives exists on devices we will eventually replace.
Recipes belong in that archive, too. We do not mean something you found online five minutes ago. Give us the dish you have made enough times that everybody expects you to bring it. Write down your greens, your macaroni and cheese, your dressing, your fried chicken, your beans, your pound cake, or your peach cobbler. Black American recipes are especially meaningful because so many of them have traveled through families in kitchens where the measurements were “until it looks right” and “until the ancestors say stop.” Write it down anyway. Add your notes in the margins. Tell us who taught you, what holiday you make it for and what you learned after the first few times you got it wrong.
That is the kind of inheritance I find myself thinking about now. A marriage creates legal relationships, certainly. Greg and I walked into a courthouse as two people and eventually drove away able to call each other husband and wife. Marriage also creates another branch in a family story. There will be things that belonged to us before they belonged to the people who come after us. Records will have to be kept. Stories will need to be told accurately. Somebody will eventually wonder what music we played in the house, what our parents looked like when they were young, what we ate on holidays, or what we looked like the day we got married. Let there be evidence!
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