MOLLY + CHELSEA

In honor of the 5th anniversary of Marriage Equality (*woo hoo*), I thought maybe it was time to blog our wedding! #LESBETHORNES

I finally understand how all of my couples feel after all these years. I finally got to be the bride for the day, and holy smokes, what a day it was! In the weeks leading up to our backyard wedding, we were getting so excited to celebrate with our 170 guests! All the little details were coming together, and family was starting to trickle in to help with last minute projects. My parents were absolute TROOPERS and helped build platforms, display walls, set up thousands of lights and keep me from getting *too* wild. Chelsea was an angel and just said yes to everything I asked for 😂 I was definitely walking the fine line of bridezilla-ness and I’m thankful for an awesome team who dealt with my craziness.

About a week before the wedding, the weather forecast took a nasty turn and I started losing it. It was sunny and 75 degrees every single day that week except for our wedding day. JUST THAT DAY! On February 22nd, it was supposed to pour ALL. DAY. LONG. Not only pouring rain, but there were also flash flood warnings for our area. Of course 🙈 I was about at my tipping point and with no solid plan B, I impulse ordered 15 pop-up tents from Amazon in hopes that they would at least keep peoples heads dry…but I was planning for an early ending to our night, and a wet muddy day.

There were a lot of tears, I can’t lie. I was so bummed that all my planning was coming to this and there was nothing to do about it anymore. I just had to handle it. It didn’t help that fellow brides/grooms-to-be who were originally getting married on the 22nd ended up moving their day up to the 21st so they could have a dry evening. We thought about doing that but realized it would be really hard with our guest count and decided against it. Turns out…they made the right decision 😅

I couldn’t sleep the night before the wedding, so while everyone was sleeping soundly, I sat on the balcony of our hotel room and watched it begin to pour around 2 am. I was sad, but just ready for it to be 5 pm the next day so I finally could marry the love of my life. Come 7:30 am, I had about 4 hours of sleep and was ready to prepped and pampered! About 20 minutes before we were supposed to start getting ready, my hair stylist’s husband texted me to let me know that she had had a medical emergency and wasn’t going to make it! (Don’t worry, she’s okay now ❤️) Her name is Chelsie…just like my wife’s name… and I announced that “Chelsie isn’t coming”. And everyone started freaking out, thinking that I was being left at the altar 😂😂😂

Another speed bump in the plan, but someone was definitely looking out for us that day… Remember about 3 years ago, when I flew out to Cincinnati the day before a wedding to photograph it because their original photographer was suffering from cancer and their backup photographer got stuck in Hurricane Irma? Well we invited Melanie + Mackenzie (the couple) to our wedding. And they just so happened to be staying at the same hotel we were the night of the wedding. And Mackenzie just so happened to used to do hair. And she just so happened to be awake at 7:30 when I texted her to ask a major favor. Our stories definitely came full circle, and they even read during our ceremony! It was an extraordinary turn of events and I couldn’t have imagined how important these two women would be in my life when I answered that one Facebook post all those years ago!

As the rain continued to pour, we had our first look and planned to just take a few photos inside, when the rain suddenly stopped. We took advantage of it and ran around the hotel as quickly as we could, knowing it would be back soon…but it wasn’t!! Not a single drop of rain hit the ground from the minute we started photos until we were dancing under the stars. We had a dry ceremony, a dry dinner, dry toasts, dry father-daughter dances, and only after people were fully boozed and no one cared anymore, did it begin to rain again. And by then, we fully embraced it 😊 We danced to It’s Raining Men (lol) and Ironic (“its’ like raaaaaain on your wedding day!), and it was the best.

Don’t get me wrong, a thousand other things went wrong. Our dresses were brown from the knee down from all the rainy mud, people were sinking into the grass in their chairs during dinner because the ground was so soft, our entire seating chart got messed up because we had to move tables at the last minute due to the rain, and someone even fell in the pool right before the ceremony started… But watching Chelsea cry as I walked down the aisle, listening to our dad’s give their speeches, and hugging everyone in sight a thousand times (pre-corona times – take me back!); those made all the the other nonsensical things that happened fade away.

It was easily the best day of my life. Just like they said it would be. I love you, Chelsea!! So happy to finally be a Thorne 💕🏳️‍🌈😘

PHOTOGRAPHER: MARY COSTA PHOTOGRAPHY | VENUE: PRIVATE RESIDENCE | PLANNER/FLORIST: BLOOM + BLUEPRINT | RENTALS: THE EVENT CO., MATERIAL GIRLS, PRIM RENTALS, GATHER AT THE GRAIN, IDO RENTALS | DJ: COACH TAYLOR | OFFICIANT: SARAH SMALL | DRESSES: BRILLIANT BRIDAL + WEDDING BELLES | MAKEUP: THE BEAUTY BAR BY ALLISON | SIGNAGE: BRIDGE + BOARD DESIGNS | VIDEOGRAPHER: SOMETHING NEW MEDIA

Y’all — I designed my own wedding invitations and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done 😅

Our first look 💕 We were supposed to turn around at the same time, but we ended up just backing into each other and stepping on each other’s dresses 😂

Chelsea is a wildly passionate Spiderman fan, hence the socks…

Our hair uncurled about 10 seconds after we walked out into the humidity! Guess we didn’t really need our hair done after all…

And now for the big sha-bang… our ceremony in my parents backyard!

Chelsea made fun of me for no less than 6 months pre-wedding about how emotional I knew I would be day-of, and particularly walking down the aisle. Little did she know that she was going to absolutely lose it! It was hilarious, but also one of my favorite moments of the day 😭❤️

These two beauties read the Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality and everyone was sobbing. It was such a special moment 🏳️‍🌈

We decided to do a “reverse unity candle” ritual during our ceremony, where each of our guests had a candle, and we went around (with the help of our bridal party) to light all the candles. It signified our love for our supportive community, as well as the love we have felt growing up around them. We asked them to send well wishes as they blew them out after a moment of reflection. It was hilariously hard due to a few breezes (and reaching out so far made one of my off-the-shoulder sleeves fall off 😂) but it was another amazing memory from our unique day!

Chelsea works at a Jewish Community preschool and has fallen in love with the culture and community. She wanted to memorialize that by “stomping the glass” before our first kiss as wives! …and she missed 😂

The sun FINALLY came out and we had the most gorgeous sunset for our last few bridal photos!

Me… crying again. Shocking, as you can tell from the rest of the day.

We ended the night with personal pizza-cookies instead of cake and it was the best decision we made!! SCOOKIE IS THE BEST!