James and Kathryn drove up to Gretna Green the day before their wedding in 2021, in a clapped-out Seat Leon. On the big day, while Kathryn got her hair done, James went to Gretna football club for a look at the grounds. Their witnesses were a photographer and “some random person who normally works there but had just come in for a cup of tea”. The ceremony, plus the photos, took about 45 minutes, then they went for a pint. Afterwards, they went to Carlisle and “did an escape room – I was still in my wedding dress”, says Kathryn. “The woman thought I was mad.” They finished with one second to spare – they still have the ticket, saying 59:59 – and “had our first marital row”, says Kathryn, about “how to get out of the escape room”.
Forget the micro-wedding, which is one with fewer than 50 attendees, and consider the micro-micro wedding – just the couple, or maybe a handful of guests. Being allowed to have a row on your big day is just one of what turns out to be a lot of upsides driving the trend. Another advantage that comes up constantly is that you don’t have to engage with the whole wedding industry. “The ridiculous overpricing … it didn’t feel like us,” says Matthew, 35, who married Jo, 30, in May 2022. They had their parents, a sister and an aunt – six guests in all.
These stealth nuptials don’t show up in the wedding expos and industry figures, but officiants notice: in Gretna Green, after a 20% rise in elopements post-Covid, half of all their weddings are now just the couple and two witnesses. The smallest wedding that Ginny Collins, 48, a humanist celebrant, ever conducted involved just two people and a photographer. The guy holding the champagne tray had to double as a witness. But, says Collins: “They’d made so much effort describing and articulating their feelings, how much they loved each other – and they’d put so much thought into poems, that I read, because there was no one else to read them. I think they did slightly regret not having their friends there.”
It didn’t take a pandemic or a cost of living crisis to invent the micro-micro wedding. People have wed on the downlow since forever, and in the 70s and 80s, maybe even into the 90s, they could have been sorted into beatniks, introverts and divorcees. Marriage used to come with more baggage – it was an important thing to reject, in the smashing of the patriarchy – and tax breaks. Karl Young, who got married 37 years ago, did it as a grad student in California for the benefit of married-student accommodation, with the justice of the peace and his secretary as witnesses, and the blood not yet dry on the blood test (in the US, these were a requirement before marriage until 2019, when Montana was the last state to repeal this bit of the Venereal Disease Control Act).
“Neither of us seemed to have any regrets,” says Young. “Her parents were not very happy. My mother was a liberated woman and she didn’t really care.” John and Linda, who have been married for 43 years, didn’t want a repeat of their first weddings, where – John says of his – “Everyone was dressed up in tuxedos, in fancy dress. I wasn’t brought up in the church so the whole ceremony was very unnerving for me. Plus, I was very hungover.” George, 50, and Melanie, 51, got married with four guests, one of whom was a baby (their first), 24 years ago. “My maternal uncle did the same thing, in the late 60s, and he was practically disowned by everybody.” But, their families knew they were going to do something like that. “Melanie was very reluctant to be the centre of attention. Walking down the aisle in front of all our friends and family … she would have done it, but she would have hated it.”
Now, though, if you objected to the institution, you most probably wouldn’t join it. So the modern micro-micro-marryer has taken a hard look at the wedding business and said, yes, in principle, but God, not like that.
This is a £14.7bn a year market in the UK, and part of that – no offence to the industry, which had as hard a Covid as any – is because a lot of it is a rip-off. Alexis, who married Mike in Las Vegas in 2012, had looked at venues before and “the minute I even mentioned we wanted to have a wedding there, the cost doubled, tripled. It was so astronomical, it seemed foolish.” That’s traditionally been part of the nuptial statement: the idea that you’re so in love that money no longer has any meaning, but when you hold that up to the light, it does look a bit daft.
But, if that was originally why Jo and Matthew went small for their civil partnership, other benefits occurred to them later. “The privacy of it allowed us to be completely authentic in our vows, because we knew it was just us and our closest family. It removed any pressure, or the showmanship of it,” Matthew remembers. Plus, when there are only eight of you, you can have nicer food. They went to the Kitchin in Leith. Imagine how much that would cost if you had a “wedding-wedding” there.
Andrew Copson, the chief executive of Humanists UK, says that since people have realised “it doesn’t have to be big to be meaningful”, couples have started to make the “ceremony itself a source of meaning, whereas in the past it might have been the party and the spectacle”. Rituals such as “ring-warming, where a wedding ring gets passed around, and “hand-clasping”, where two or three guests might wind a ribbon round their hands to symbolise the group’s investment in the union, make a feature of the smallness. You can go a lot more pagan with a handful of guests, though I went to a wedding once where we had to ceremonially stamp on a plank to break it, and that did take the full 120 of us. They are divorced now.
In Scotland and Northern Ireland, a Humanist celebrant can marry you; in England and Wales, you still need a registrar to do it as well, though British Humanists UK is campaigning to get that overturned. In theory, this could open up the possibility of the smallest imaginable guest list, where you get your one photographer friend to become a celebrant and they can do everything. This raises the philosophical question of the tree falling in the forest which no one heard; did you actually get married at all, or are you no more married than if you’d just said “I do” to each other on the sofa?
Alexis is a make up artist, who says, “I’ve done tons and tons of weddings over the years. There’s always one member of the party going: ‘This. This is why I hate weddings. It’s so stressful.’” Even extroverts find it a bit much – the choreography, the hubbub. Nobody who has a micro-micro wedding ever ends up saying the day was a blur. Carole Anne, who lives in Sydney now, was in London on sabbatical when the UK legalised same-sex marriage, and she married nine years ago, in Camden Town Hall, London, near to where her wife grew up. “We literally tapped the witnesses the day before – two of my partner’s friends. It feels just as significant to us as if there had been hundreds of people there.”
It’s likely to put a bit of pressure on the friends, though, when there are only two of them. When Adam and his husband first started planning, they wanted a huge wedding, but they also wanted it in May 2021. “We were still able to go to the pub beforehand – it wasn’t super lockdown. It is in my mind that it was during Covid, but it doesn’t make me feel bad.” The couple had pared it down to two friends, and they “felt bad, saying: ‘We need to make this super special because it’s not the day you wanted.’” Actually, it turns out that if you have champagne and confetti, that does still feel pretty wedding-y.
While there will usually be at least one person who feels their lack of an invitation very keenly, nobody ever seems to regret the money they didn’t spend or the disjointed conversations with second cousins they didn’t have. “We made the cardinal error of putting it on Facebook; that was the biggest mistake,” Alexis said, “We’d told everyone that we were going to Vegas; they should have understood what that meant. One friend read us the riot act: ‘You don’t know what you’ve done. You’ve denied us the chance to be there.’” Everyone else was mollified by the fact that they videoed it, and played that at a potluck later in the year. “It was mortifyingly embarrassing. We were so in love, just looking at each other thinking, ‘I can’t take my eyes off you, you’re perfect.’”
*Some names have been changed
