Thank you so much for sharing our special day with us!
Photo Galleries
Here are all the photos we have from the wedding. We have so many photographs, and we give special thanks to some of our friends who took hundreds of photos throughout the wedding and the weekend.
WEDDING PHOTO GALLERIES
Warning, there are a lot of photos! Best viewed on a desktop.
Photos of You?
I noticed that there are some of you who aren’t in any of the photos, so if any of you have photos from the wedding that include you and your party that you could share with me, and haven’t already, I would love to see them!
Especially would like to get photos of the 2 CIA student chefs at the grill, the smorgasbord of pot-luck dishes, and photos of Matt’s family & friends.
The Reading
A number of you showed interest in the reading we did during the ceremony, excerpts from an interview with author Alain de Botton on the Hard Work of Love. You can find the full interview here.
Jannette and Matt wanted me to read some excerpts from an interview with author Alain de Botton that they really connected with. He speaks of the hard work of love and relationships:
We are strangely obsessed by the run up to love. And what we call a love story is really just the beginning of a love story, but we leave that out. But most of us, we’re interested in long-term relationships. We’re not just interested in the moment that gets us into love; we’re interested in the survival of love over time.
When you ask someone to marry you, you’re asking someone to be your chauffeur, co-host, sexual partner, co-parent, fellow accountant, mop the kitchen floor together, etc. And on and on the list goes. No wonder that we fail at some of the tasks and get irate with one another. It’s a burden.
One of the things that romanticism does is to teach us that the great love stories should be above the mundane. So in none of the great, say, 19th-century novels about love does anyone ever do the laundry, does anyone ever pick up the crumbs from the kitchen table, does anyone ever clean the bathroom. It just doesn’t happen because it’s assumed that what makes or breaks love are just feelings, passionate emotions, not the kind of day to day wear and tear. One of the lessons of love is to lend a bit of prestige to those issues that crop up in love, like who does the laundry and on what day. We rush over these decisions. We don’t see them as legitimate.
The acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures seems to me what love really is. Love is at its most necessary when we are weak, when we feel incomplete, and we must show love to one another at those points.
For example, why is it exciting to kiss someone for the first time? What’s this odd thing we call kissing? Nevertheless, we like it. Not just because of its physical feeling, but because of what it means, the meaning we infuse. And the meaning we infuse into it is, “I accept you. And I accept you in a way that is incredibly intimate and that would be quite revolting with anyone else. I’m allowing you into my private space as a way of signaling, ‘I like you.’”
There are endemic issues that every couple, however well-matched — and there is no such thing as a perfect match, but every couple will encounter these problems – that love is something we have to learn, and we can make progress with, and that it’s not just an enthusiasm; it’s a skill.
And it requires forbearance, generosity, imagination, and a million things besides. And we must fiercely resist the idea that true love must mean conflict-free love, that the course of true love is smooth. It’s not. The course of true love can be rocky and bumpy. That’s the best we can manage as the creatures we are. It’s no fault of mine or no fault of yours. It’s to do with being human. And the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love.
It’s this understanding of teamwork, shared responsibilities of the mundane, and acceptance of who your partner is that brought Jannette and Matt together, and their willingness to do that hard work of love that makes their relationship so strong.
The Honeymoon
Iceland was gorgeous! We saw so many waterfalls and we got to see the northern lights!
The Wedding Portraits
In October, we went to Bonticou Crag in the Mohonk Preserve with our friend, photographer Chris Vultaggio, who took beautiful portraits of us in the setting sun on the cliffs of Bonticou. Here are a few of our favorites (un-retouched):
