Don’t Tell Grandma… The Bride and Groom Are Already Married
There’s been a significant rise in couples getting married in secret before their big day—here’s why.
Reported by Vogue.
Something is shifting in the way couples are getting married — and it's not just the venue. More brides and grooms are legally tying the knot in quiet, intentional ceremonies well before their big-day guests ever arrive, according to Vogue. A front porch on Mulberry Street. A neighbor's living room. A Las Vegas chapel booked a year in advance. The setting barely matters; the point is that the moment belongs entirely to them.
The numbers back it up. A 2025 Pinterest Annual Wedding Trends Report found searches for "city hall wedding dress" surged 128 percent, while "civil ceremony photography" exploded by a staggering 637 percent. Hannah Roze, founder of wedding planning platform Plannerd, calls it "a full-on movement" — one driven less by logistics and more by a genuine desire to reclaim intimacy in an era when weddings have become sprawling, heavily documented social performances. "It's about really getting back to your values," she says. "Who do you actually want to know everything?"
The Legal Wedding vs. The Fun Wedding
For some couples, the calculus is emotional. Mary Blackburn and Collin Jamieson exchanged vows on the porch of their shared apartment the night before their own engagement party — eleven guests, two dogs, and a toast at the bar where they had their first date. Their 265-person California wedding followed months later. For others, it's frankly financial: Stephanie Maitre and Sam Powers got married early on their accountant's advice, saving up to $15,000 in taxes. Maitre showed up in Dr. Martens and a fur coat and calls the whole thing an enhancement, not a compromise. Veterans of the military have understood this math for decades, using early legal marriages to sort out orders and benefits — the rest of the country is just catching on. Alexandria Thompson and Ashwani Srivastava are eloping in Las Vegas a full year before their planned wedding because they know that on the actual day, they'll barely see each other. Hannah Chubb scheduled her courthouse wedding exactly 365 days before her Tuscan celebration so she'd only ever have one anniversary to remember — and arrived in Italy knowing the hard part was already done.
Veteran planner Mindy Weiss, founder of Mindy Weiss Party Consultants, has watched this trend accelerate alongside social media's pressure to perform perfection. Getting the legal piece out of the way early, she says, lets couples "move forward more calmly" — and in a world that keeps generating new reasons to be anxious, that calm is increasingly the whole point. The ceremonial wedding becomes what it arguably should have been all along: a party. A celebration. Something joyful rather than something to survive.
The only real complication? Grandma. The "just us" wedding still carries a faint whiff of taboo for couples worried about optics or family feelings — but the couples doing it aren't calling it a secret so much as a boundary. The legal wedding and the fun wedding can coexist, and one doesn't diminish the other — if anything, removing the paperwork from the altar might be the most romantic thing you can do.
Read the original at Vogue.
