I spent my Monday at the Art Institute, listening to and chatting with folks in the wedding industry. Wedding Wire hosts its educational event in multiple cities throughout the country, and I was fortunate to attend the Chicago stopover. We heard several wonderful speakers who shared their wisdom about marketing, blogging and technology, which will be of use and assistance to small and large businesses alike. We all ate breakfast and lunch together and swapped business cards and told our stories. It was lovely.

In the middle of all this vital information sharing and gathering, of this attempt to gain more work and grow in the industry, no one talked about how to get more money out of an engaged couple. No one talked about the industry’s notorious reputation for taking advantage of the person paying for the wedding day, or that the inclusion of the word “wedding” means you can up-charge at least 50%. Of course no one talked about that, you might think. No one wants to talk about those things. But if they had, we would have all agreed that weddings do take a lot more time and effort than the average job, because weddings REALLY matter to the engaged couple. It’s our job to make sure they are happy, and we do have to charge enough (but jeez, not too much!) to make sure we can financially afford to devote the necessary amount of time to that important day.

And then Katheryn Hamm from gayweddings.com stood up and talked about weddings in a way that got to the heart of why I (and probably most people, at least when they started) want to be involved with weddings, and that is love. If you offer your services to any kind of couple with love, then, well, then you can’t go wrong. Cheers to that.

And cheers to all the people who made our wedding in May about as love-filled as a day could possibly be, including the professional photographers in our families who captured memories as they were being created. We are happy.