One of the highlights of my 2025 and, honestly, of my life was my wedding with Kamila last October. Even though getting the second marriage right has obviously been the tradition on my father’s side, there is something inherently scary and weird about getting married for the second time. All the more reason to do the ceremony right.
This article serves two purposes.
First, to show off the photos. Here they are, made by Daniela Dlabolová (whom we can only recommend): danieladlabolov.pixieset.com/kamilaanddavid.
Second, wedding traditions and their modifications are interesting in themselves — and we decided to change or ignore most of them. Maybe you will find inspiration here for your own wedding. Or at the very least, we can now explain what we were going for.
Done, simple.
Now, about the traditions.
Before the party
We did our own versions of the bachelor’s party. There are versions of this that are legitimately scary or super awkward; we have been blessed with great friends. Kamila spent an extremely cozy weekend with friends, food and climbing. I got a super intense weekend of partying and special activities prepared just for me — from trips to mysteries — all interconnected with references to my life and our marriage. In the end, I cried tears of joy. So, this is possible, yay.
Second, witnesses. I was not able to pick one best man, so I picked three of them, representing different areas of my life — all of them key people who have helped us a lot and who I hope will continue to have a beneficial effect on us. They also helped with some of the preparations.
Speaking of preparations, we quickly decided that we needed a wedding coordinator: and Dominika/Lex was great. She took care of a lot of the boring and awkward tasks and, crucially, helped manage things in the last days before the wedding.
We had a bit over 110 guests. Since quite a few of them did not speak Czech, we distributed pins clearly indicating “this person wants to speak English” for the celebration. This simple intervention solved most of the issues we were afraid of when mingling the Czech and international crowds.
The order of the day
The order of the day was quite simple.
The ceremony was at 11:30 — and since we wanted something memorable, we decided to do it on a boat, on a pond. We waited till the last moment to check the weather, but it worked out. Mad respect to our priest, Petr Jan, who blessed our marriage and managed to deliver a great speech while in danger of capsizing. After that came the signing of the official documents and the congratulations.
The lunch was kicked off by speeches from our three best men. Also, since I figured that I would not have time and energy for a proper sit-down with everybody at the wedding, I decided to prepare personal letters to “my” guests. That was a bold choice for sure, and it took me some 100 hours, but I figured that a chance to express gratitude and sincere feelings in a moment like this is quite rare. I hope I will not get married again.
Cutting the cake is one of the traditions we deemed harmless enough — and since we decided to use our cats as a secondary decoration motif (with autumn being the main one), we simply had to order six cakes, each stylised as one of our cats. Karolína Serbousková made them for a very fair price; they were both beautiful and yummy, and people could argue about which cat is the best (Rosenkrantz is).
Speaking of arguing about the cats — we wanted to oil the social interactions a little, so we asked our friend Jan Mottl to prepare a simple app posing as a competition. People could sign up to represent different cats, then got a selection of activities: completing puzzles, connecting with other participants and talking with them about icebreaker topics, taking selfies, and what not. At one point during the day, we combined the six cats into three teams to create a bit of drama — it both produced some fun moments and made it easier to get to know people from our quite distant social groups. Of course, people were 100% free to ignore it.
We agreed that we kind of hate the pressure around catching the bride’s bouquet, so we decided to throw two plushies with a backstory instead and just found new homes for them. Sometimes we still receive pictures and stories about them, which is cool.
At 17:00, we had a short pub quiz about us, which rocked and provided a fresh impulse for hanging around and small talk. The first dance of the bride and groom was… very much in our style. We both don’t dance, and we were somehow trying to prepare something — or more precisely, we planned to prepare something. In the end we just winged the most clumsy slow dance with Book of Love playing, but some people still cried, and it opened up the evening for dancing.
The last common activity was a bit of a surprise moments before midnight. We figured that it is nice to have some surprises in life. Led by Michal Kunc, people quickly learned and then sang Lifetime of Adventure, my most favourite song (and an important one for Kamila for reasons). After that, we retreated to our room. Other shenanigans went on and the party was fun, but this is not the place to cover that.
Apart from common activities and the smartphone minigame, we also set up a place for Polaroid pictures, books for writing down messages and congratulations, and the Box of Promises. People could promise us things — and we received a lot of beautiful ideas and messages that we are now reading from time to time, and it still brings us immense joy.
A few practical notes
On a more practical level: one thing about weddings, especially above a certain size, is that they are extremely expensive. No need to describe things in detail here. If you are planning a wedding, we have some tips and experiences to share.
And one last thing: after many, many conversations, we decided that while the “forever after” is beautiful, we want a bit more intentionality. We set up a five-year vow-renewal cycle. So… hope to see some of you in five years?