Credit Shelby Deeter
Episode Summary
Tria Wen knows a thing or two about letting go of expectations. She used to be a wedding planner who loved her job. The only hard part was the divorce. Her divorce.Now Tria is getting remarried. She and her fiancé want to create a unique wedding ceremony that is not only different from her first wedding, but also one that won’t give her any flashbacks to the many weddings she has planned. But how exactly does she do that? What are her options? Is the sky the limit, or is there a way to go too far and screw it up?
Episode Resources:
Tria Wen: https://triawen.com/
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About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Chang: I think I’m a bit of an anxious person. We all have a little bit of anxiety in us, you know, even from children and just being nervous about the first day of school. And the way I’ve managed my anxiety over the years is to plan very carefully and plan well. And I feel like it’s a lesson in my life that I want to plan well still but also let go of expectations and detach myself from the outcome.
Tria Chang knows a thing or two about letting go of expectations. She used to be a wedding planner who loved her job. The only hard part was the divorce. Her divorce.
Now Tria is getting remarried. She and her fiancé want to create a unique wedding ceremony that is not only different from her first wedding, but also one that won’t give her any flashbacks to the many weddings she has planned. But how exactly does she do that? What are her options? Is the sky the limit, or is there a way to go too far and screw it up? Join me for a conversation with Tria Chang. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas.
Welcome to our first episode. I’m so glad you’re here! I want to take a few minutes to give you the lay of the land for this show. This mini-season will focus on weddings and commitment ceremonies. We’ll be speaking with guests who created unique, out-of-the-box events that allowed them to commit to their partners in the way that felt the most right, the most authentic. Some of the stories you will hear may sound familiar. Others may surprise you. We’ll touch on the idea of self-commitment as well as committing to partnership with another person.
But first, let’s take a step back and look at the purpose of ceremony. Why do we engage together in this way? How does the tool of ceremony support us? In the words of psychologist Evan Imber-Black, "Rituals are a container for strong emotions and they help us to hold them. Whether that's joy or whether that's sadness."
And emotions are a huge part of change, right? As we go through life we face transition after transition: Mom and dad bring home our new baby brother. Our family moves and we have to make friends at a new school. We get the call that our closest grandmother has passed. We go away to school and have to learn how to survive in a new climate in a different part of the country. We go through breakups and maybe divorce. We meet new people we like and maybe get married. Our parents grow older, maybe move into care and eventually pass away.
We are unique in how we move through each of the transitions in our lives. Some may be easy and others not so easy. But at least we know we’re not alone. Transitions are such a known and expected part of life that certain ceremonies have been created to help us create the container for the emotions they bring up.
Marriage itself can bring up a huge host of emotions, not only in the couple but in those closest to them as well. We think of weddings as joyful occasions, but they’re not without their challenging emotions.
It is SO important to create room for all of the feelings that come up so that we can show up to the altar as our fullest selves ready to make the commitment at that deep level. How we structure our wedding ceremony can dramatically affect how much room there is for emotion and the change. We'll talk more about this throughout our first season.
Now I would like to share a story with you about a divorced wedding planner planning her second wedding. While planning her first wedding, Tria Chang noticed that many successful businesses in the wedding industry were run by women. Inspired by this, she started her own wedding planning company in 2009. Starting a new business in this field allowed her to hold on to the sense of joy she felt from her own wedding and to begin her new career in a rose-colored garden (those are her words). In 2016, she sold the business. During that time she saw a lot of weddings.
Chang: Yeah, I spent five years as a wedding planner. I’ve probably participated in or seen at least 100 weddings.
100 weddings? Wow, I could barely imagine that. I asked Tria about the range of traditions she had seen as a wedding planner over those 5 years.
Chang: I should preface this by saying not everyone hires a planner. Those who do hire a planner tend to be people who want a little more guidance and a little more structure. So I would say these types of people tend to be a little bit more conventional in what they’re looking for for a wedding. At the same time, my business partner and I, we emphasized our company’s creativity and how we were more interested in providing couples a chance to bring their individual story to the forefront and their individual personalities as opposed to cookie-cutter weddings. So we got clients that had an interesting tension between traditional needs and wanting a little bit of individualism. So I would say the way that played out usually in terms of traditional things is, in the timeline, in the structure of the day, it was almost always a ceremony, cocktail hour, dinner with toasts, and then first dance, dancing, and some kind of grand exit. So people generally felt safer in a decided-upon format that was often dictated by their vendors because caterers, for example, have a flow that they’re very confident in executing and they will encourage couples in that direction. Photographers also have a set number of hours and different types of shots that they‘re used to providing so that kind of guides the couples as well. In terms of mixing other of the things into the creativity, people would draw from their cultural backgrounds or different religions, sometimes from their personalities or how they met. So a couple who met in law school might have pages from legal textbooks as part of their decoration or names of drinks like Liability Lemon Drop or something fun to bring that part of their story into it. But I do think there tends to be a little bit of anxiety or even fear around stepping too far outside of wedding boundaries because people would worry about, you know, is it still a wedding, are we really married after this? Most of my clients were getting married for the first time, so they more wanted to make sure they did things right, whatever that meant. So there was a lot of looking toward the vendors for guidance or trying to fit their special creativity into a set template.
Thomas: So you mentioned people getting married for the first time. Did you also work with people getting married for the second or third time?
Chang: That happened later on in my wedding planning career because in the beginning, when you’re just starting out as a planner, you can’t charge as much because you don’t have as much experience. So we often had younger clients who couldn’t pay as much. So that sort of shaped the types clients that we had. And then as we got more experienced as planners and were able to charge more and offer more in our planning services, we did start getting couples who were getting married for a second or third time, families who are blending, so people who had children as part of the ceremony and who had more complex family relationships. And yeah, that was actually very encouraging and inspiring for me because I went through a divorce during that five years as a wedding planner and in the beginning I was only seeing people getting married for the first time and hearing things like, “Oh! You only get married once, so better have a perfect day!” and just really feeling the pressure of that and then as I started getting these couples who were on their second marriages or who had children from a previous marriage, I saw how it was more complicated, but also more beautiful in a way. I remember seeing one ceremony where there was the couple at the altar as usual with the officiant. But they also had their two children, one who was an infant they were holding in their arms, and another little girl whose hand they were holding. And they just formed this really special circle and that was really inspiring for me.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. I love that image.
Chang: Yeah. The complications can be beautiful.
Thomas: That’s so well put! I love that. And that’s kind of what we’re talking about here, right? Contrasting the perfect wedding day where everything is perfect, and kind of simple maybe in the way it’s executed, to real life and the complication that we all each have in ourselves and so many feelings and with each other and the blending of families, my family, their family, everything is blending and there’s lots of complication and it’s supposed to all jam into the perfect day and somehow just be wonderful.
Chang: Yeah absolutely, it is a little bit limiting in some ways.
Thomas: And you are preparing for your second wedding right now.
Chang: I am, I am. Yes, it’s a very different experience this time.
Thomas: And you said to me that you’re looking, that you and your fiancé had been looking through all the wedding traditions and trying to pick only the ones that were the most meaningful to you. So I’m curious where you are in the process now and how you’re feeling as you’re approaching...
Chang: Yeah, so I had the advantage of expertise and of seeing many different kinds of weddings and in thinking about what really mattered. And I talk to my fiancé about it and luckily for me he’s really interested in exploring those things as well and questioning why do we do certain things and do we need to do those things. So for example, walking down the aisle is kind of a given. And having your father, as a bride, give you away it’s kind of a given for most people, unless your father passed away and there’s a strained relationship. The default is to have the groom already there at the end of the aisle waiting for you and then to have your father walk you down the aisle and essentially give you away, give responsibility to your husband of you. And I think, I did do that the first time. I was young and in my 20s. I wanted to, as I mentioned, just do right by wedding traditions and make sure I didn’t mess anything up or, you know, curse our wedding in some way. So I did have my father walk me down the aisle and I don’t regret it. It was really a special time for us and very beautiful and emotional. My mom had passed away just months before, so it felt particularly meaningful for me to be holding my father in this very emotional time. But at this point in my life and 35. I’ve lived across the country for my father for over a dozen years now. So the symbolism doesn’t quite make sense of him giving me away to someone else. And for my partner and I, it was also important for us to realize that this is a phase of our life that we’re going on together. It’s not him standing there waiting for me to join him and get on his journey. It’s really going on something together. So, one, we don’t have an aisle, we’re not getting married in a church, but we plan to just show up to our guests together at the same time.
Thomas: That’s, that’s a nice example of how you’re reclaiming the tradition and make it your own.
Chang: Yeah, and there are so many things that we do so automatically I think, without questioning or wondering about them and it was important for us to really pair down things and think, you know, do we even need this or that? Or, can we do this in a different way? How can we do something that has meaning in every step of it for us? My advice to that friend and to anyone who wants to make a wedding their own is, you are absolutely allowed to do that. You don’t have to follow someone else’s way even if they have more experience than you, or even if they care about typical wedding things more than you do. It’s really your day. But of course, if your family is important to you, there are ways to involve them in a way that will make them feel included and loved still. So, yeah it’s really different for everyone, but I do think conversations between the couple about priorities and what the core essence of their relationship is - I think that will really help determine what the day is. For my partner and I, we have a little story that is kind of our core essence. We were invited by his uncle to go crabbing in the Pacific ocean and I was very excited. So we were in his boat and it was speeding through the water and I was thinking in my head, “I think I’m going to do this every weekend, I love it so much!” But then when he stopped the boat it started moving in a way that my body did not like at all so I ended up, unfortunately, throwing up at least a couple times over the side of the boat. And my fiancé also was quite affected, so we ended up just kind of lying in the back of the boat and feeling really sick even though in our minds, we thought we would be great crabbers and really helpful in putting up the traps and getting everything set. We were very useless, useless to the point of only being able to look at each other and even though we have this desire to take care of each other and fix things for each other, all we could do was hold hands and look at each other and say, “We’re together”. And for us those two simple words and that sentiment of just recognizing that we’re together we really realized was the core of our relationship, just being together through times that are sickening, that are difficult, that are surprising, that are joyful as well. It’s really a very simple thing that our whole relationship is just about sticking through those times together. So that’s kind of the theme of our little wedding, and that’s why we wanted to have a wedding with fewer bells & whistles. We didn’t want to be kind of on stage. Like a lot of weddings feel like it’s a performance by the bride and groom and that you only get to wave at them from across the room or maybe have a quick couple words with them but we really wanted to feel together with there, so we paired it down to a very small guest list so that we can really just talk to people and we won’t be distracted by having to perform something or having to remember certain words or dance steps and just be with people.
Thomas: Are you going to serve crab at the wedding?
Chang: We are actually… let’s see, are we having crab? We are having a clambake. But I’m from Maryland so crab is very popular there and seafood in general. But I think there were a couple of allergies among the guests, so we’re having a clambake with some seafood items that avoid everyone’s allergies but it’s a very, yeah it’s a family-style, the chef described it as being a big vat that he’ll bring out and kind of dump on the table which is very exciting to us so yeah. That was one of the few vendors. We just sprung for a chef, because food is an important way for us to show love to people that we love them and feed them and nourish them, so our chef is the only main vendor and then we also have a photographer there for a few hours just to capture some of the moments together.
Thomas: Wonderful. Well, thank you.
Chang: Of course, thank you.
Tria's story reminds us that beautiful things can happen when we allow ourselves to step outside the box and do things our own way. Sure, there might be friends or family who don't understand our choices, but truly, in the case of a wedding, this is the couple's day and the celebration is about the couple - who they are individually and who are they are together. And who is anyone to get in the way of that?
Tria Chang is a writer working on a memoir about divorce as a wedding planner. You can read her work at triachang.com. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. That is the very best way you can support this new baby show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.