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After I proposed to Stephanie in September 2016 I married her on 2 September 2017. After a lot of organizing the day of our marriage turned out fabulous. And best of all, we still feel as if we are in love and enjoy the days we have spent together since then.

We decided to give ourselves approximately a year to organize the marriage. I consider this to be a very long time. Depending on what your choices are it could have been done in a few months, but with our wishes a year was justified. Apparently a year is close to the average time taken to organize a wedding.

The first choice was the wedding location. A good wedding location for us meant a combination of attractive outdoor and indoor spaces. The latter is important if the weather doesn’t cooperate. These are hard to find around The Hague and the ones which do exist are expensive. We turned down Landgoed Te Werve in Rijswijk because the location’s catering was inflexible, since we had specific ideas about what should be on the menu. In the end we settled on Kasteel de Wittenburg, a beautiful country house in Wassenaar.

This location was relatively expensive, but it was worth it. We intended to get married only once in our lives, after all. What convinced me was that I could talk directly to the chef about the catering and the menu. The location had a beautiful garden and outdoor space, as well as a spacious interior.

The dinner we had ordered for the day guests turned out to be merely okay by my standards, it wasn’t as good as I had hoped for. This might have been so because a new chef had been employed by the time of our wedding. Unlike the former chef, I did not communicate with him and involve myself more in the vegan dinner dishes. Our day guests, who ate the meat and fish dishes, were satisfied though.

Personally, I’d like wedding locations to allow external catering so that we could have hired the finest Indonesian or Surinamese catering from The Hague to provide the dinner for the day guests and the snacks for all the guests in the evening. Like in a self service buffet instead of having personnel to serve all the food to the tables. Taking this further, if the location would allow it you could buy all the drinks yourself and tell your guests they can help themselves, so you can again do without personnel to serve it. Stephanie didn’t like these ideas though, so that’s why I compromised and we opted for Kasteel de Wittenburg.

We spent more time on finding a good band. From other weddings I’ve visited I know an average or a great band can make a big difference in the atmosphere at the party. We went with Plunck, which is a cover band which did mostly pop music, but they were very good at their job. They weren’t expensive either. We highly recommend them.

For the wedding cake we employed Perfect Pastry. Usually I’m not a big fan of wedding cakes and would prefer a good apple pie or cheese cake even at a wedding, but Stephanie convinced me to do a traditional wedding cake. Perfect Pastry first invited us for a tasting to design the wedding cake and were very pleasant to work with, so they get our recommendation. For the wedding photography, we employed Rutger van der Bent and decided to go to the Clingendael public park in The Hague. The weather cooperated nicely that day. Both the photographer and the location have our approval.

Finally, I want to emphasize how important it is to have a good master of ceremony to have everything running smoothly on the day of the wedding itself. I’m very grateful to Stephanie’s sister and her friend for doing this.