I used a problem solving A3 to help me get married in 2020!

My husband (weird to say now!) and I have been together for 17 years this past September, 7 of those years we had been engaged.

Marriage hasn't been a top priority for me because I felt like we were married-both because of the duration of our relationship and all of the experiences we have been through together. As of late, marriage has become more important to me because his family prefers that we are officially married before we have kids. Although it scares the crap out of both of us, having kids some day is something we'd like to do. I'm not pregnant and we aren't sure when we will have kids but we are getting more serious about it.

Dave and I both are 35. The majority of our friends have kids now. We have been waiting because we have wanted to get some traveling and experiences that we knew would be more difficult to do with kids. We also wanted to feel more financially stable. Dave didn't necessarily get paid as much as he would have because of his time getting his PhD and I took a pay cut working for a startup for a short period of time. Dave is working for a startup now but is doing better financially in his than I was when I was at one. We know you can make it work no matter what your finances are, but this was something that was important to us. Ultimately, we didn't want to look back and feel some sort of resentment or regret.

As we have gotten older, we have realized we didn't really want a big wedding. We didn't want to spend a lot of either our money or family's money on a wedding. I would rather any money go towards a future house, potentially childcare or just to have savings because we are living in a pandemic right now! Because of the pandemic, there have been more and more opportunities to have a micro-wedding. I got pretty excited about this and we started to get a plan in place. At first our goal was by our 17 year anniversary (September) but that quickly passed and then our goal was before the end of the year. If we didn't have a strict deadline, things will really be postponed (hello 7 year engagement!).

I had lots of ideas that could work. I honestly would be happy just being eloping or getting married at a courthouse, but Dave wasn't into that. It was a challenge because I would do a lot of the plan brainstorming and email outreach to venues but Dave didn't think I was actually thinking through some of these ideas. We are both Type A personalities, but he works a lot differently than I do. He needs a written out solid plan with everything figured out. I often rapid prototype (sometimes in my head while I am running!), testing out ideas to see if they have legs and then go full speed in planning. He jokingly said, "You make all these A3's for your work, why don't you do one for our wedding!"

Well I did. I've gotten into the habit of quickly getting a draft of A3's together so within 10 minutes, I had our "Dave and Jess Get Married in 2020" A3 sent to him for comments. The whole point of a problem solving A3 is to get buy in, so we worked together to modify it. The tougher part was to get his family's buy in. They weren't quite aligned with what we wanted. Although we didn't share the A3 with them, we shared our root cause analysis with them and explained why we wanted what we did and why we were making certain decisions.

No one got everything they wanted. There were compromises so that there was enough buy in from everyone. In the end, I think everyone was happy. I am so happy to be finally married to Dave and begin a new Chapter as Mrs. Vines. The only kicker is that I realized I may have married someone who needs an A3 for every big decision in our lives! Good thing he married me!

Photography by Lindsay Hite