Where on earth are we going to DO this, anyway?

Because Billy and I come from opposite ends of two different states, with family spread out all over the place, and were planning on moving to New York City, once we had a date in mind, we had to figure out where we wanted to get married. Not just a ceremony location or a reception hall, but a state. And then what part of the state!

It was a little daunting, and even got a little bit heated at times.

Possibilities we considered:

Destination Wedding: Ooh, go some place tropical in the middle of February! Who wouldn't love that? Billy and I took our first vacation together to Hawaii - wouldn't that be romantic, going back there for our wedding? Plus it gives a tropical vibe without requiring passports (the exact reason we chose Hawaii over a more exotic tropic locale). Or what about Las Vegas? I loooooooooooooooove Vegas, my parents loooooooooooooooooove Vegas, Billy has family iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin Vegas (sorry, felt like I had a theme going with repeated vowels).

But we ditched the idea pretty quickly, as Billy was telling me he had about a hundred family members that needed to be invited, and there was no way his mom was going to take 'no' for an answer, and destination weddings (in my mind at the time) pretty much implied a limited guest list. Add in the fact that we wanted to invite all of our friends from college, who would essentially still be poor college students at the time we got married...we eliminated this one pretty quickly.

New York City: Would be home for us, but a destination wedding for everyone else. Still, it would be a slightly more reasonable destination for our mostly-midwest located families and friends.

Except that we still didn't know when, exactly, we were going to move out there. Which meant I'd either have to plan everything from afar, or plan everything in six months, on top of moving and finding a job. Oh, and New York is expensive. The midwest would stretch our dollars farther than New York would.

Ohio: Get married down in Billy's home town. Has the advantage of being where he's from and all of those hometown connections...but I felt like my hands would be a little bit tied planning a wedding in Billy's backyard from afar. I pretty much would have had to wait for him to be free before making any planning trips down there, because while his family is charming and sweet...they are still his family at this point. I would feel totally awkward being down there around them without Billy present. Plus, and maybe this is a bit selfish and/or stereotypical, it was really important to me to have my mom help plan this, something that would be hard to do if she was six hours away.

See, while I have a younger brother, I am most likely the only child of my parents who will get married. My younger brother is autistic, to a degree where the likelihood of marriage is slim to none for him. So this would be my mom's only chance to help plan a wedding for one of her children. Billy would counter by saying it might be the only one his mom gets to plan...but Billy has an older brother AND a younger sister, both of whom are in or have had very serious relationships. They're certainly not out of the wedding pool by any means.

So that left us with...

Michigan: My home state, the state where we met and went to college...it just fit. Especially once we decided that, yes, we were going to get married in or near my hometown. We briefly considered getting married near where we went to school, but since neither of us have family in town it seemed like it would be easier from a logistical perspective to do it on the west side.

Are you and your fiance from different places? How did you decide where to get married?