Why We Didn’t Have a DIY Beach Wedding

Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.

Before my fiancé became my husband—in fact, even before he became my fiancé—we spent a lot of time on and around an 18,600-acre Missouri reservoir known as Mark Twain Lake. We invited friends to join us on the pontoon boat for charcuterie and cocktails, we took the kayak and the stand-up paddleboard into coves, and we spent many hours enjoying both the sand and the not-quite-surf at John F. Spalding Beach.

Which is why, as soon as we knew we were planning a wedding, we asked ourselves what it would take to host it there.

"Imagine the two of us," Larry said, "saying our vows on the beach at sunset."

The iconic cliché of the sunset ceremony—and you’ll have to forgive us, we were newly engaged—quickly expanded into what we hoped would become an extended beach party. Having the event at Mark Twain Lake would make it a destination wedding, in the sense that the lake is far enough away from everything else that even our local guests would have to set aside the entire day to attend, and so we began thinking of activities that would make the trip worthwhile.

"We could rent a few extra kayaks," I said, "or play beach volleyball."

"And we can get a bunch of stuff going on the grill!" Larry was very enthusiastic about the possibilities. "Our beach wedding would be about bringing the people we love to this place that we love, so they can love it too."

My mother, who probably loves us more than anybody, was less enthusiastic about the possibility of spending her oldest daughter’s wedding day playing beach volleyball. She suggested that, since we were still very early in the planning process, we might want to consider having a more traditional kind of beach wedding with a ceremony and dinner and dancing because that’s what has been proved to be the most enjoyable for everyone involved. In fact, we might even want to go back to our original plan, which was to have our wedding in our backyard garden. Hadn’t we been talking about that ever since we bought the house?

The truth is that my mother is right about most things—and we did in fact have our wedding in the backyard, but not before we figured out all of the reasons why a beach wedding was wrong for us.

Here’s what we learned.

Not everybody loves the beach

Some of the people we loved thought that a day full of swimming and kayaking and grilling was a great idea, but those were the people who had been coming to the lake with us for years.

The rest of the people we loved were perfectly willing to come to this place that we loved, if that was where we wanted to have our wedding, but they very quickly let us know that they probably wouldn’t love the beach as much as we did—especially if they were required to participate in sports and activities.

"Can we just come for the sunset ceremony?" they asked.

"Sure," I said, reassuringly. "Come whenever you like."

Some people may want formal wedding photos

Once we agreed that none of our guests would have to get into a kayak unless they really wanted to, and that anybody who wanted to come just for the sunset ceremony was welcome to do so, my mother asked the next important question: "Are you going to be wearing a swimsuit in your wedding photos?"

I told her that I probably would end up wearing my swimsuit during the ceremony if it came at the end of a daylong beach party, since it wasn’t like Larry and I were going to be able to shower and change and style our hair. Then my mother asked me if there weren’t any showers at the beach and I said of course there were, but they were beach showers.

It quickly became clear that many members of my family wanted to use the wedding as an opportunity to take the kinds of photos that could only be taken when everyone is gathered together. The various family groupings, all of the siblings together, the big picture with everyone in it and so on. From there it made sense that Larry and I should think about how we might look presentable, in the sense that whatever photos we took would live on various mantels for decades, and that we should make sure that everyone else had the opportunity to look their best as well.

"I have this white eyelet lace sundress that I wore when Larry and I bought our house," I said, "and I told him I wouldn’t wear it again until we got married in the backyard, but I could wear it on the beach instead and we could do the more traditional kind of wedding with a dinner and a ceremony and dancing."

Beach wedding logistics are difficult

As Larry and I put our minds toward having a traditional wedding on a Midwestern beach, the logistics of how everyone would enjoy the day became more and more complicated. "We still need to confirm whether we need a permit," I said, "and if we’re having a formal dinner we’ll probably want to rent a shelter house, and we may want to do the thing where you rent a bunch of chairs and tie ribbons around them and arrange them in rows on the sand."

"Can we get by without renting chairs if we keep the ceremony short and get everybody back to the shelter house for dinner as quickly as possible?" Larry asked.

"Probably," I said, optimistically. "We’ll also want to rent the shelter house for at least one day before the wedding, because I want to power wash the entire thing beforehand. Those places are full of spiders. Does that mean we’ll need to rent a power washer?"

And suddenly we were talking about budgets and bunting and staple guns and Pinterest boards and whether we’d need to give each guest a pocket-size thing of bug spray with a ribbon tied around it; how we would keep the food at a safe temperature and whether we’d need to assign one of our guests the job of remaining at the shelter house during the ceremony to keep the squirrels off the crudités.

Then we started thinking seriously about the logistics involved in getting people from the shelter house to the beach, including the difficulties that might come up for guests who have specific mobility needs, and then I said the sentence that ended the entire project:

"Larry, when they come back from the ceremony, they’re going to have sand in their shoes."

"What do you mean?"

"If we want to do a formal beach wedding at sunset and then dinner and dancing afterward, people are either going to have to wear their dress shoes onto the beach and then back up to the shelter house, or they’re going to have to leave their shoes at the shelter house and make their way across the parking lot barefoot, or maybe they’ll carry their shoes, who knows, but either way they’re going to get sand on their feet, and that means they’ll be uncomfortable during the dinner and dancing."

So we had our backyard wedding instead—which was exactly the kind of wedding Larry and I had been talking about ever since we first bought our house. We had been so enamored of the beach-wedding-at-sunset image that we forgot what should have been obvious. We kept the parts of the beach wedding that we liked, including the part where my sister brought over a bunch of lawn games for the kids to play, and added the parts that my mother knew would be best for everyone, such as formal photos with the extended family.

Most importantly, we brought the people we loved to a place that we loved—only in this case the place was our home.

Related Reading:

My 2024 DIY Backyard Wedding Inspired a Backyard Refresh

The Reason to Love Lakes Is the House Peeping