Preparing for Marriage
An engagement signifies an intention to get married. Our first project as an engaged couple was to come to an agreement on the date of the wedding. Some of the factors we put into consideration when determining the date of our wedding were:
1. Career stability. We were both in transition at the time of the proposal. My King had just begun his Masters programme, while I had just gotten a licence to work in UK as a doctor and was then job hunting. He didn't want us getting into this major milestone of a life event in our transition phases. At least one of us had to be stable career-wise before we got married.
2. Counselling. My King was very particular about us receiving proper counselling before venturing into the institution of marriage. We couldn't go in unprepared. Hence, we attended an informal and a formal marriage counselling. We got informal but structured counselling from our mentors viz. his former boss and his wife. We had several sessions with them both physically and via video calls. The formal one was organized by our local church in Nigeria and was done through 6 sessions of video conference calls. We were among the first set of diaspora couples for counselling. During these sessions, we learnt about communication, roles and responsibilities, great expectations of marriage, managing in-laws, being united, finances, sex, and so on. Our formal counselling required us to read at least 2 books on marriage.
Other pre-marital conversations included where we would live after marriage, when we would prefer to have children and how many, our career goals and how they would fit into the family and long-term plans, expectations of each other in the marriage, etc. All these we have committed into God's hands. By His grace, we will face it all together.
Planning a Wedding
Planning the wedding did not stress us much. It feels a bit weird saying this as I have seen people under so much pressure during wedding preps. King maintained a calm demeanor even in the midst of his Masters courseworks, exams and thesis. To him, planning a wedding is not much different from organising one of his community development projects @GenLeaders. Many people get stressed during the planning process when they try to over-impress or go beyond their capability. Not to deny the fact that planning from outside Nigeria helped ease off some physical stress as we engaged a wedding planner. Moreover, we had friends and family who helped do our leg work. I had some concerns about things not going as planned, but we just had to trust God and the people to whom we had committed the work to.
The first thing we did after securing a date was to agree on our budget. I was happy to have a man very good in numbers and Excel sheets. We made a list of everything we thought would be needed or have observed at weddings we had witnessed. After that, we eliminated what we considered unnecessary and then split our budget across all remaining items; we had done a prior investigation on what each item should cost on average. This became our guide in negotiations with vendors and our event planner, most of which were done via Whatsapp. We only met most of our vendors on the wedding day, save for those who were already in our network.
We decided on the number of guests to entertain based on our budget and the quality of wedding we desired. We allotted numbers to both families and ourselves and tried to emphasize strict adherence to the numbers allotted when our families began to send out invites. Since we were not in Nigeria to give all our guests IV cards, we also made e-invites.
Thankfully, our wedding ceremonies were largely hitch-free. Pictures at Instagram #radiantking or visit our wedding website - RadiantKing
The following are some of the vendors we engaged and their Instagram handles and they all did a fantastic job.
Hall decoration - @patakievents
MC - @omootalks
DJ - @emjoelove
Cake - @kairostreats
Make up for white wedding - @lipsnlids
Make up for traditional wedding - @triadasbeautylounge
Photography & Cinematography - @josephentekumefilm
Radiant ~ December 2018
This is the final of the RadiantKing series. Thank you for following our love story. We hope you enjoyed it. Please continue to put us in your prayers. Cheers to a happy & fulfilling married life.
Click here for all episodes of the RadiantKing series and please leave comments.
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