How We Told Our Family We Were Eloping

I know, I know… it’s scary thinking about eloping and having to tell your family that you made the decision to go through with it. I’ve been there. But let me just start by saying that eloping is WORTH IT. We had the most incredible adventure together as husband and wife and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Given the nature of my job, I think both of our families expected us to run off and elope, but when it came down to us breaking the news to them, they still took it harder than we thought and tears were shed. We knew deep down, that they would understand this would be the best decision for us financially. Being 30 and 31 with potential children in our future, saving as much money on our wedding was a no brainer.

The only way we could make them feel included in the whole process was having them at all the normal formalities leading up to our elopement day. Dress shopping, suit shopping, bridal shower, a stag party, etc. I know most people don’t typically do these things when they elope, but we still wanted to feel celebrated by our family and friends and we both enjoyed every single second of it.

Leading up to the day of our elopement, we knew that we wanted to travel to a place that was special to us. Last year I photographed an elopement in the Redwoods and on our road trip we stumbled upon this location on the Southern Oregon Coast. We just KNEW that would be the perfect location to exchange our vows and that it was.

The day of, we had the worst weather possible. Pouring rain, 30 mph winds and of course it was the coldest day out of our whole trip. We chose to have our ceremony on the cliff at our Airbnb in our sweatpants with our family on a zoom call. When we got our family on the call, they were all so confused why we weren’t in our wedding attire. It was rainy and windy and they couldn’t even hear us, but we rolled with it anyways. We chose to do a first look in a separate location just a few minutes from our airbnb. It was private, beautiful and the sun came out as soon as we started exchanging our vows and rings.

We didn’t publicly announce we were eloping, we only told our close family and friends. We wanted to wait for the preview photos from our photographer to announce it. During the wait time, we were able to have privacy to be able to soak in the memories we were creating together as a newly married couple.

It’s been a month and a half, and we are still living on cloud nine. Eloping was absolutely the best decision we could have made for ourselves.

Enjoy the photos from our special day taken by Liza Standish Photography.