In celebration of our 9th wedding anniversary, I'm sharing the story of how Erik and I planned our wedding in just a few days, adapted from a chapter in Work in Progress, the book I wrote with my brother, Steve Ford. Here's how it all happened…

Ever try to plan a wedding in four days? I did. And it was my idea of perfect.

It was a Wednesday night in November and Erik and I were staying at the Bowery Hotel in New York City. Erik and I had been newly engaged for a couple of months. Erik was opening his first New York Buck Mason store and I was designing the space. So here we were on this chilly New York night, cozy, in this gorgeous hotel. We were talking about when we wanted to get married and where we wanted to get married. We were just kind of at the beginning stage of hashing out. All we knew at this point is that we couldn’t WAIT to be husband and wife. Some brides dream of a huge wedding with hundreds of people. Not me. Since I was a little girl, I dreamt of something romantic, but tiny.

I didn’t care what type of wedding it was. I was kind of dreaming of a small, intimate, romantic affair. BUT in reality I was totally open. If Erik showed up, then I was good. You know? Erik, on the other hand, wanted a big wedding. And because I love Erik, I didn’t want to talk him out of it. I didn’t want to let him down from his dream. Let’s write our guests down, I said. Just write down the most important people in our lives. So we did. And the list kept going and going. Turned out that we had a whole lot of people that we loved. Erik and I both have lived in so many cities—we have friends scattered all over the country. We have large families, we have friends we still talk to from youth, huge support teams within our businesses. I’m telling you, the list just went on and on.

Erik and I looked at each other and then back at this never-ending list. We were having a shared moment. You know when you look at someone and it’s like you’re reading each other’s minds? It was clear that we were both overwhelmed by how many people we’d want to invite. “We could just, you and me... get married,” I said. “And let people know after it happens. I guess in a word, elope.” I was kind of joking about eloping, but maybe I wasn’t. I couldn’t believe I was saying it. But it felt so natural. Did we really need all of these people? If we wanted to get married—we should just get married. There are so many expectations that families and society put on us. When you are planning a wedding, please, do not listen to every person in your life. You cannot listen to your parents. (OK. Sometimes listen to your parents! Mom’s only advice on this wedding was actually the most important twist in the entire plan. And I am so glad we listened.) You cannot listen to your friends. (OK, take some advice—but for heaven's sake, don’t take it all!) Erik took another long look at the list. He heard what I was saying. He really got it. I could see him digesting it.

“Why were we going to wait a year to get married? So we could get everyone in a room drinking and dancing? We could do that on a Tuesday!” I said. “Let’s figure out what we want. What if we just get married, you and me.”

Erik looked at me and gave me his dreamy little smile that gets me every time. “As long as our moms are there,” he said, “I’m good.”

Yes, that’s right. That’s the kind of guy I married. A guy who not only cares about his own mom, but who also cares about mine. We started dreaming up details that night. Just together in our room at the Bowery Hotel. First, we decided to just have our immediate families—that’s about 18 people. Then we went to the next step: location. Where did we want it? “It has to be beautiful on its own without my help,” I said. I spend my days making spaces beautiful and deciding every tiny detail. I didn’t want to do that for our day. Really, folks, I didn’t want to do very much! “I don’t want to have to pick any decor. I don’t want to have to worry about napkins. I don’t want to talk about lights. I just want to show up,” I told him. It just had to be pretty. Erik looked around at the beautiful hotel room we were in. “Why don’t we just do it here?” he said. And all of a sudden it became very clear. Yes, of course. We should 100 percent do it here! When these little lightning bolts strike, you have to jump on them. They don’t come often. Your instinct will lead the way. It will allow you to create the best possible decisions for yourself even if it seems slightly wild. And it was wild what we were doing—of course it sounds more wild than it actually was. It was really just two people in love who were getting married, like millions of people in love have done before us.

Now it was around midnight. “Call down to the front desk,” I said. We needed to know if this was even possible. Did they have the space for us? Were they booked until June 2045? What the heck did it cost? We called down and we left a message for the events people, giggling at our self-proclaimed genius.

Erik and I met in Venice, California. He walked into my backyard with a friend while a few of us were sitting around a fire. It was a beautiful California night. I was married at the time and didn’t think twice about him. Looking back I actually think my friend who had brought him along had a crush on him. But the truth is there was no magic spark; there was no uh-oh moment. He was nothing but a nice guy sitting across the fire in his cowboy hat in my backyard. I do remember one thing about that night though—II remember appreciating his energy. I remember how nice it was to hear his laughter in our backyard. I couldn’t even tell you what he looked like at that moment. But he did have a glow around him. Or maybe that was just the fire pit. After that night, my friends and I would just see Erik around Venice. We’d wave to each other and be on our way.

Years later, I went to one of his Buck Mason parties. He had a tiny little store off Abbot Kinney, a shopping street in Los Angeles, that sold T-shirts and jeans.

“Where’s your guy?” he said to me.

“Erik… I have to tell you something… we broke up almost a year ago,” I said. “WHAT?! WHAT?” He literally threw his hat on the ground. I looked at him confused. Um, he seemed to be taking it worse than our families.

His eyes lit up. “Are you two dating other people?”

“No,” I said, “But I’m sure there’ll be a line around the block for him when we do.” (I was referring to my ex-husband.)

“A line around the block—for you.” Erik said.

My stomach dropped. I genuinely didn’t know who he was talking about. Surely, not me? A line around the block for me?

When you’re in a relationship for as long as I was, and once you go through a divorce, you can underestimate your desirability. I didn’t feel sexy. I didn’t feel wanted—and I certainly didn’t want anyone else. You don’t think of anyone like that and assume no one thinks a second thought about you. People don’t look at you. Nobody likes you. I didn’t feel sexy. I didn’t think of myself as anyone that anyone would be interested in dating. I was just totally shut off. It was not even on my radar.

I smiled and walked into the party with a new little shine of light. Erik told me later that he never took his eyes off of me that night.

Erik says that he started dating me six months before I started dating him. He pursued me for a long time. We’d go out for dinner, we’d go out for drinks. We would stay out and talk all night long. No kissing. We’d hug goodnight and off he went. He would call me the next day to make plans for the next time we could hang out. True to his course. He was on a mission. At first I didn’t want to kiss him. Didn’t think a second thought back then about it. But as we talked more, as we became closer, and I started to realize what an amazing man he was, all I WANTED was to kiss him, but I continued to wait. I knew this was different. I knew that first kiss would change the trajectory of my life. I knew if I kissed him there was no turning back. And as I sit here writing this with a big smile on my face, and feeling our sweet little girl kicking inside of me, I’d say I was definitely right.

I say to him now, “I’m so glad you did that. I am so thankful you pursued me, that you knew what you wanted and that you knew better than I did.”

Every day, Erik sends me sweet nothings. Yesterday he woke up and texted me, “Are you still my wife?”

“Sure am,” I said.

“I love marriage,” he texted back.

That’s just his brain. He’s a conscious guy. Very present. Even 3,000 miles away, I feel his presence more than most people that are in the same room. He’s emotionally present. And I’m an emotional human being. I feel everything. I cry at commercials!

When we started dating, Erik said to me, “It’s so wild. I feel like I’ve known you a million years—but also like we just met yesterday.” To this day, that’s how I feel about him. Like we’ve known each other for a million years, but we just met yesterday. As Erik says every day when he looks around at the amazing world we are lucky enough to live in, “WHAT A LIFE!”

Albert Einstein once said, “You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece.” We’re all so concerned about making everything fit in a box that someone else drew for us—especially when it comes to weddings—but life doesn’t always need to work that way. Erik and I were so busy with our schedules that for us, having a wedding in this amount of time was an amazing blessing. And let’s just say we aren’t scared of spontaneity. We love coloring outside the lines. In fact, let’s not even color outside the lines. I say, let’s make new lines. That’s exactly what we did with this wedding.

"I love it,” I said. “Let’s call our moms.”

Because if our moms can’t be there, or if they weren’t thrilled with this plan of ours, it was going to all lose steam real quick. Now, I was still in Knoxville, remember? So I called Mom. “Hi, Mom. Hiiii. Uh... Can you be in New York on Sunday?” I asked her.

It was now Thursday.

“Hi, Honey! ….Huh?"

“Well, Erik and I want to get married here in New York. On Sunday. We just want to make sure you can be there?”

Mom paused. She’s known me for 37 years. She knows how I operate. Sometimes on the spur of the moment. But she was still trying to talk it through with me. Was I sure I wanted to have this kind of wedding? Was I sure I wanted it right now? Yes, I was absolutely sure, I told her. We just want to do it. And we want to do it here. She wasn’t saying no…. So that’s something! “Well. What’s Erik's mom say?"

Erik’s mom asked the same question! "What’s Leanne's mom say?” I think they were both hoping the other one was going to say no. Not that they didn’t want us to marry each other, but I’m sure the spontaneity of it all gave them a bit of a surprise. It was Erik’s dad’s first time to New York City! And what an incredible first time to come—for his son’s wedding. Of course then we had to contact our families. Could Erik’s sisters get there? Was Steve free? Could Michelle and her husband and kids pull this off? Yes. Yes. Yes. Everyone can do it. Everyone can be there Sunday. It just seamlessly all fell in place. It was a GO. Or more aptly, it was GO TIME. Now I needed a dress! (And Erik also needed something to wear! He found a tuxedo down the street—how easy is that? He surprised me. I walked down the aisle to a man in a three-piece Italian tuxedo. Dreamy.) I texted my assistant in L.A. “I have this big, flowy dusty rose vintage dress in my closet,” I said. Can you overnight it to me? And also can you send those red strappy heels?” I didn’t want anyone to catch on to what we were doing so about a minute later I texted her again: “Date night!” With probably some kind of heart emoji or something. I made it seem real casual.

Friday, I got the box. A gorgeous vintage Christian Dior dress and perfect Alaia heels all shoved into a little wrinkled ball. But that sums me up perfectly. I opened it like it was a treasure chest filled with gold. And it was a treasure chest, wasn’t it? My beautiful floor-length gown was shoved in this box and I pulled it out like it was a magic trick. And out it came. My wedding dress. Check. Because if you’re going to do last-minute romantic, why not wear a dress that you

already own and love? OK, sure, not all of us own a big ol’ vintage gown. But again, color outside the lines. Make new lines.

Why does your wedding dress even have to be a gown? It can be absolutely anything. No one said it had to be white. No one said it had to be brand new. This is actually a really important point here. Because so many women get completely fixated on the dress and look at dresses that are out of their reach in affordability and sometimes even blow their entire budget on the dress. So many of us are caught up in wearing white and going to a certain bridal store because that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what is expected of a bride. I can only ask you why? What’s our motivation for this? Are you doing this for you? Or are you trying to be some kind of perfect bride? You don’t have to pull a gown out of a closet like I did. I was lucky! It was magical. But there are plenty of ways for you to individualize what you wear that day.. Did you know that white wasn’t even a typical color for a wedding dress until about 1840 when Queen Victoria of England decided to wear white? Before that time, brides wore brightly colored dresses. Dresses they could wear again. Dresses that could be overnighted to them in a FedEx box! But it also goes to show you that you can make new rules for what you want your dress to look like. What you want YOUR wedding to be. Your mother or your sister or your aunt might think that you’re going to wear white because that’s what they wore. But what if you want to wear—or do—something utterly different? You can wear stripes. You can wear ombre. You can wear red. You can wear pink. (Mandy Moore just wore a pink tulle gown to her surprise backyard wedding.) You can plan a wedding in four days.

Back to our wedding! It was Friday now. I was back in NYC from Knoxville. Did I fail to mention that Saturday was the big opening of Erik’s Buck Mason store which I was designing and installing. (I know, I know. We really are.) There were a few more wedding details. We needed a cake, for instance! Erik and I headed to the bakery on the corner, just down the street from his store—and of course it just happened to have a famous chocolate cake. We ordered two pretty cakes: chocolate and vanilla. Music? Check: got it covered. We hired a four-piece jazz band from Brooklyn to sing and play for an hour. It’s New York City—the world is your oyster! What about champagne? Yep. Got that too. “We need Champagne on a silver tray,” Amanda Len, the event director said, “and we will have them handed out in white gloves.” I’m telling you, Amanda made sure our wedding was all lovely and beautiful. In fact, I just saw her last weekend and said to her: “You’re the reason we're married right now! So thank you." It’s really important to let people help you with the details. I’m 100 percent certain that the “bridezilla” reputation stems from the bride being overwhelmed because she’s making too many decisions on her own. Of course this is important to make your decisions. It’s your day and everyone should be on the same page with your vision. Yes to all of that. I get the vision thing. Look at any of the homes I’ve decorated. I’ve created a business around my vision! An entire career. But you also have to be able to delegate for your wedding and let go of some control—especially when you have ideas that don’t fit into the usual wedding box. Let people help you. (I’m adding this to my life motto list.)

What was next? Flowers—of course! The hotel suggested a florist in the neighborhood; I practically skipped over there in my little cloud nine world and floated into the flower shop. My cheeks hurt from smiling. “Hi! I’m getting married in two days,” I said. “We need a couple of bouquets and three flower crowns for our nieces, please. Whatever you think works. Just have them match the Bowery Hotel, please.” The Bowery Hotel has an earthy palette with deep

green velvets and dusty pinks, red drapes and leather sofas. Rich maroon tapestries hang on the wall and murals in the lobby look worn and aged as if they’ve been there 100 years. Dark wood paneling lines the walls and the exposed wood ceiling seems as if they’re straight out of an Italian tavern. The florist nodded her head and said that she would pull something together to “match the Bowery.” That was the extent of my flower planning. I can't help but smile thinking about it. My bouquet looked as if I picked it from a fall garden: deep reds, and dusty roses like my dress. Swoon. The flower girls’ crowns were made of bay laurels with dusty pink roses; they carried messy bouquets of bay laurel. Erik’s niece wore a lovely black lace dress and my two little nieces wore dusty pink chiffon skirts and maroon sweaters. And of course I went and found them flowered Dr. Martens boots--an ode to my everyday boot. They all looked darling. Photographer? I called my fashion photographer friends that I had hired for years back in my creative direction days. “I need a favor,” I said. “Can you be in New York on Sunday? I want you two to shoot my wedding!” I gave them complete carte blanche. I told them: Shoot it however you want. And I meant it. They’re professional photographers. They have that magic eye. Again, I didn’t need to work inside the lines. I told them very specifically: I don’t need—or want anything except to capture this moment. Just capture the night.

We weren’t exactly going to the chapel to get married, but nevertheless, we needed someone official to marry us. Someone who represented the two of us and our faith. Now this is my favorite part of the wedding planning. (Well, scratch that, all of it's my favorite part!) Our childhood Young Life Leader and pastor, Chris Buda (Yep, Buda!) was a really good family friend. Always has been. Chris was a huge part of my childhood, good friends with my dad and our entire family, and a huge part of my faith. This was a huge decision, step and promise that Erik and I were making. We wanted it to be with someone with deep connections and roots to who we were. Buda lives in Pittsburgh, but I called him. I believe they call this a “Hail Mary.” It was out of desperation. The worst that could happen is that he could say that he couldn’t do it. If you don’t put the question out there, then you’ll never know the answer.

“Chris, can you be here Sunday?” I said. “Erik and I are getting married and we want you to officiate.”

Well, guess what?

Chris came out to New York City! On such short notice. Just to marry us. The stars just aligned for us. It really did feel that way.

It was Saturday night. The night before the wedding. Everybody was there. Both sides of our immediate family had just met for the first time at the Buck Mason opening earlier that day. We were in this beautiful hotel. There was a fire glowing in the lobby. Everyone was thrilled. (And, yes, I’m not going to lie, they were also a little confused!)

Erik's business partner Sasha Koehn and his wife Victoria were in town for the opening of the store so of course they were going to come to the wedding too. And as an added and very magic perk —Sasha's wife, Victoria, is a calligrapher. You know where I’m going with this. That night, in my hotel room, I wrote out an invitation that reads something like this: “The pleasure of your company is requested this evening…” Victoria then crafted the invitations in calligraphy on the Bowery Hotel stationery. Yes, the hotel stationery. Work with what ya got! It also helps that their stationery looks like a European love letter. But really, there were no rules here. We didn’t have paper. We didn’t have letterpress. I didn’t have note cards. But, hey, we had a professional calligrapher! Erik asked the front desk for a typewriter. They had one, which

cracks me up. So he sat in the lobby and typed out each guest’s name on the Bowery Hotel envelopes.

That night while everyone was sleeping, we slipped the handmade invitations under each person’s hotel door. That way, they’d find them first thing in the morning. They’d actually get an invitation to the wedding. It was really the magic icing on top.

Sunday morning, I was in a dream. I was so grateful that both of our families were able to be by our side. I thought of Dad. How much he would have loved Erik. How similar they really are. How proud he’d be that I was picking such a great man and creating such a beautiful life for myself. He would have loved this. I walked down the aisle to “Let it Breathe,” by The Water Liars. I completely surprised Erik with the song. It was a song that summed us up. To a T.

I had my dusty rose gown on and walked towards him as he stared into my eyes. Erik later told me, “You looked like a Greek goddess that traveled from the 1920s to marry me.” It was the best day of my life. After the short, simple ceremony, we piled down the stairs into the hotel restaurant. Our wedding dinner was one big long table in a small, cozy room. We feasted on an amazing, gorgeous dinner with the wine flowing. After dinner, we all sat in the lobby in front of the fire. Our New York friends showed up and celebrated with us. It was a beautiful, and dare I say, perfect night. We are all still basking in the glow of it. Mom, Michelle and I always talk about how special it all turned out. Mom said we really left no detail unturned. Erik and I reminisce about it—how we hacked the system and had a wedding better than anything we could have ever truly planned in a year.

This is true. I really feel like if we had tried to plan our wedding for a year it wouldn't have come off so well. Some of my friends won't get married because they don't want to deal with the wedding and I say, You don't have to deal with the wedding. You just have to focus on the two of you.

Maybe you’re being a devil’s advocate. She had a hotel all picked out. That’s why it worked. OK, I’ll go down this road with you. Because yes, that could have been possible. That hotel might not have been available. I’m gonna tell you what. The hotel wasn’t even my first choice. I had told Mom we were just going to get married at City Hall. Because why not? Well, Mom was very wise as she always is. “Don’t get married at City Hall,” she said. “Just find somewhere pretty to get married.” We could have gotten married in Central Park. We could have gotten married at a restaurant. There are options. Yes, it happened to work out perfectly that there were rooms available, that the space was available. (Because we were open to having it another day besides Saturday.) But if it hadn’t been--we would have made it work out just as perfectly. You have to live the way you want. You have to put your imprint on it. Just because space isn’t available, you’re going to let it ruin your day? That’s crazy talk. We all have to be more flexible about our lives. We have to be able to see multiple visions. We have to be easy on ourselves and more compassionate with ourselves. Allow yourself to feel the bumpy ride of life—it could turn out to be an inspiring moment! Erik and I still talk about our wedding in awe. “We really aced it,” I said to him recently.

One of my favorite photos of the night is a group photo. No one is looking at the camera. Erik and I were at the end of a long wooden table filled with our families on each side. I’m staring into Erik’s eyes, smiling at him. Erik’s got a serious look, like he’s about to kiss me. Two candelabras glowed on the wall. Straw baskets hung from the ceiling. A massive gold-framed mirror with a smoky frame behind us. A patina haze encircled the room. The two of us gazing into each other’s eyes surrounded by the people we loved most in the world. Our family. WHAT A LIFE.

Love Each Other Well

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