Amy and Michael were engaged after just a year, so they didn’t have time to plan. “We only got engaged on Christmas Eve,” Amy says. “We spent Christmas with our families. We weren’t with our closest family or anything.” When they got home, Amy took the engagement ring out of its box. “I wanted to tell my family immediately,” she says. “We were sitting in the living room and I pulled it out. I was wearing this pretty dress I’d gotten for Christmas and was sitting on the sofa. My grandma was like, ‘You know, we should have that first,’ and so that was it.” They’d had a lot of pressure to plan everything around their big day, Amy admits. “It’s this weird thing where you don’t want to tell people before you get engaged because you want it to be special,” she says. They didn’t know where to begin when they were planning their wedding. “We wanted to find a cool venue in Manhattan,” Amy says. “I wanted to have it in the Meatpacking District because I’ve always been obsessed with that part of town, so I wanted to get married there. I wanted to find an unconventional place for the wedding. We went on the internet and really put the pressure on ourselves.” They ended up at The Standard, in Manhattan. “We found the wedding venue the way most people do, which is you’re either really excited about a location that you think sounds good, or you don’t like the location you’re going to, and then you move on to other options,” Amy says. “We never went through any other options at all. We didn’t have a budget because we didn’t know what our budget was. We booked the venue on a Monday, and everything fell into place. Our photographer was a friend of a friend. Our wedding planner, a friend of a friend’s mother, we asked her. We just had a lot of friends and they all offered up their services, and it all worked out really well.” When people started asking how much their wedding cost, Amy felt strange about it all. “The only person that had to give up anything was our photographer,” she says. “We asked friends if they wanted to be in our wedding. We got some friends that are super cool musicians in Manhattan, and I know they’re not well-off at all, and he told me that he would lose money on the wedding. We just looked at each other and decided that was his problem and ours would be our wedding, so he was cool with it. “I really appreciated that my friends were all like, ‘Don’t worry about the money part at all, we’re all willing to help you out,’ and it really was something that was special.” They were also lucky that they didn’t have to spend a lot on clothes or anything special for their wedding. “I got my dress at The Gap,” Amy says. “I got my dress at H&M. I didn’t have a wedding dress, which I’m pretty sure almost everyone has these days. We had just decided not to have one, but to get married in our street clothes because we were traveling so much, and it was just something that just worked out really well. “I made our friend put together a slide show of photos of our trip. We met each other in Central Park and then walked the whole way down the West Side. We stayed in Harlem, so we walked to our hotel from there.” They wanted something that felt more intimate than a big white party, where everyone was sitting at long tables. “I’ve never had to sit at a table,” Amy says. “It wasn’t anything that we set out to do. That just happened. It’s really nice that we found it, and we think it’s a lot of fun.” They didn’t plan much for the rehearsal dinner, and just had a drink at the pub where they were staying. “He had gone to the bar for his drink, I was holding my drink in my hand. He came up and tapped me on the shoulder, and was like, ‘Hey! So I just got down on one knee!’ “So I said, ‘So, that’s cool. What do you think?’ He said, ‘I’m fine with whatever you want. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, or be stressed. I don’t want you to have to get down on one knee again.’ So I was like, ‘What do you think of the place?’ And he said, ‘You think we should do it there?’” The day of their wedding was filled with tears and smiles. “We both had champagne and sang an aria,” Amy says. “I don’t know what happened with me. I think I just had a lot of emotion that day. I was crying all day, but I was really happy. I’m a huge fan of the opera. I get to go to operas that aren’t in New York a lot. So to be able to get married at the Met was amazing.” They’re glad they went with less than they would have liked to. “It was a lot cheaper than we thought it would be,” Amy says. The wedding reception was at their friend’s apartment in a trendy part of Manhattan. They had it catered, but didn’t feel forced to have any specific food, since they didn’t really have a budget for that. “We decided the food for it,” Amy says. “It was a nice, large buffet-style sit-down dinner. We had it all on tables. There were two bars, and some people brought snacks.” They didn’t do any favors, and didn’t even have a garter for Amy. “There was no garter,” she says. “It was just a slip dress.” They wanted to avoid a lot of the big wedding stuff that many people have now. “I like to keep it small and keep it classy,” Amy says. “We wanted it to be intimate and about us, not about people you don’t even know.” And then came the honeymoon, which wasn’t that big of a deal. “We were gone for the first two weeks of May,” Amy says. “We took a trip to Italy, Rome. It was just wonderful. We had a blast. We walked around and saw all these other cities. We had been to Florence before. We wanted to do a honeymoon in Europe. “Our friend knew we wanted to do it, but they weren’t on board with it. They offered to take us to Europe after New Year’s Eve. So that night, I called them and told them that we really did want to do it. We were at this bar in town, and we got there, and I wasn’t going to go get an ATM and have them give us the money. We had already booked this trip that we wanted to go on. It was nice of them to ask us instead of to just take the money. So we met up with them and they gave us the money. We took the train from there to Rome, and we were out there for a week. We were in Rome, Venice, Venice, Rome, and Venice again. We had to do four cities, but we made it all happen in just one week.” Amy’s advice for other brides and grooms is to do what you want. “When I look at our friends, I look at their weddings now and I see so many pictures and so many posts and all this wedding planning stuff,” she says. “Don’t get sucked into all that. You are getting married, and that’s it. When you get there, all these people show up, but you need to put your energy into that special day. Do something that is unique and special for you two. You don’t have to have all these details and all this grandeur, but put your energy into the little things. “We had an iPod at the wedding. We had white linen napkins, that’s it. You don’t need ten flower girls or two servers or a wedding planner. It was me and my husband, a couple of friends and relatives and his best man, and we had a cake that we were supposed to have but didn’t. It was the easiest thing in the world. I just didn’t go and get a bouquet of flowers. I’m not really a flower person. I think my parents got the idea when we got engaged. I have no flowers in my house. I don’t even like them. “My wedding, my wedding, my wedding. When you come home and you’re tired from traveling, you don’t want to do any of that stuff. You want to sit down on your couch and be in your wedding clothes. You don’t want to go to your boss, because it’s