Breaking Free From Convention

We set out to design a ceremony about love - love for each other, love for our community, love for our planet. Planning our wedding helped us break free from convention and these rigid norms we thought we had to follow. Our wedding ceremony became a reflection of us.
Jordan Kallman
The Social Concierge

There’s a big push for authenticity right now, but what’s really inspiring to me are the things that involve adversity - going through challenges together. My business partner is French and he’s constantly reminding me that ‘to struggle is a part of life’. Life is supposed to be difficult, full of complexity and passion. There’s supposed to be tough times. The struggle is beautiful, and it can be spectacular.

The art of the spectacular seems to be missing from our lives. When it comes to planning events, I tend to take a maximalist approach! I’m drawn to things that entail awe, wonder, and curiosity. So when my girlfriend and I decided to get married, I knew there had to be both a feeling of adversity and a feeling of the spectacular.

There’s a big push for authenticity right now, but what’s really inspiring to me are the things that involve adversity - going through challenges together. My business partner is French and he’s constantly reminding me that ‘to struggle is a part of life’. Life is supposed to be difficult, full of complexity and passion. There’s supposed to be tough times. The struggle is beautiful, and it can be spectacular.

The art of the spectacular seems to be missing from our lives. When it comes to planning events, I tend to take a maximalist approach! I’m drawn to things that entail awe, wonder, and curiosity. So when my girlfriend and I decided to get married, I knew there had to be both a feeling of adversity and a feeling of the spectacular.

When I think about ceremony, it should be centred around emotion, and yet emotions are inherently complicated. For something like a wedding to be meaningful, there needs to be some inward reflection, some soul searching, and some individuality. There also needs to be room for those universal truths. A ceremony needs a set of principles to guide you, values that help make it your own. 

When Dawn and I decided to get married, we wanted to do it at Burning Man, but our parents and grandparents had a hard time wrapping their heads around that. We realized that we needed to divide the ceremony into two parts: one for our family, and one for us. When it comes to planning a ceremony, you can only create the vessel and then you have to step back and let it do its thing. 

We decided to have our family wedding ceremony in Portland, under a beautiful bridge. During the ceremony, my brother temporarily passed out, like literally collapsed mid-vows. It was scary, but he ended up being fine. Looking back, that moment led to this beautiful imperfection. My best friend helped my brother up, and there was so much emotion from everyone in that moment. I’ll never forget that feeling. Another part we weren’t expecting was the role of tradition in our wedding. Seeing Dawn’s dad walk her down down the aisle was so emotional. Everyone was crying. For me, the whole purpose of the Portland ceremony became centred around Dawn and her dad having that moment. 

Our Portland ceremony included 50 people, made up mostly of friends and family who would not be joining us in the desert. We purposefully set a culture where people had to meet each other. I’ve been to weddings where I didn’t know anyone and it felt like such a missed opportunity to leave without having made any new connections. We wanted people to get to know each other the way we knew them. Portland felt perfect, and we could have left it at that, but there was something bigger calling us.

My first Burning Man experience was in 2009 and it transformed my life. I went in curious, and I came out changed. Before that, I considered myself a bit rigid, always following the rules. I saw things as black or white. Coming of that experience, I realized that truly anything was possible. I saw things that made no sense, and yet somehow made complete sense. It was spectacular. I came home and launched a new business based on what I experienced.

I didn’t go to Burning Man again until 2016, and this time I went with Dawn. I was afraid to go back as I didn’t know how it could live up to that first experience. Thankfully, she had her own transformational experience, and I realized that I had some letting go to do. Earlier that year, I was super bottled up, holding onto things so tightling and trying to control the things I was manifesting. In the desert, I was reminded that the art of letting go can be wildly powerful.

My first Burning Man experience was in 2009 and it transformed my life. I went in curious, and I came out changed. Before that, I considered myself a bit rigid, always following the rules. I saw things as black or white. Coming of that experience, I realized that truly anything was possible. I saw things that made no sense, and yet somehow made complete sense. It was spectacular. I came home and launched a new business based on what I experienced.

I didn’t go to Burning Man again until 2016, and this time I went with Dawn. I was afraid to go back as I didn’t know how it could live up to that first experience. Thankfully, she had her own transformational experience, and I realized that I had some letting go to do. Earlier that year, I was super bottled up, holding onto things so tightling and trying to control the things I was manifesting. In the desert, I was reminded that the art of letting go can be wildly powerful.

Dawn and I realized that our core principles were very similar to those of Burning Man. We are generous. We are communal. We love living and being amongst others. We are responsible, and also a bit zany. And so, when we decided to get married, we knew we wanted to tap into those same values. We wanted to get married on the playa. And so we started planning. Burning Man became this massive vessel to centre our ceremony around. We wanted to share this moment with the people we loved, and we wanted to invite others to be a part of it too. We started to think about what mattered most to us as a couple – what gave us meaning?  

For the entire history of our relationship, Dawn has written me love notes and stuck them in my bag, on my toothbrush, in my car. It felt so special to feel her love, and I wanted to share that feeling you get when you receive a love note. After lots of ideas, we landed on building a cathedral in the desert where people could write, and read, love notes to our planet. We called it Love, Earth and suddenly the backdrop of our wedding felt so big and so spectacular.

Installing that cathedral was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was messy and there were countless problems. It was madness, and it was also magic. We didn’t complete it in the end, at least not the way we envisioned, and yet that didn’t seem to matter. It was a communal experience, centred around love, and it was where we got married. There were so many rituals that people incorporated into our wedding ceremony, things we never could have planned. There we were, surrounded by a thousand love letters, getting married amongst people we loved and people we’d just met. 

We set out to design a ceremony about love – love for each other, love for our community, love for our planet. Planning our wedding helped us break free from convention and these rigid norms we thought we had to follow. Our wedding ceremony became a reflection of us.

About Jordan Kallman

Jordan is Partner at The Social Concierge, an innovative, award-winning event design agency. An obsessive problem solver, Jordan builds solutions through collaboration and uses consumer co-creation as one of his leading tools. Ultimately, the generation of happiness, the production of belonging and joys of bridging connections is what drives him.

Photos by Nick Harborne

About Jordan Kallman

Jordan is Partner at The Social Concierge, an innovative, award-winning event design agency. An obsessive problem solver, Jordan builds solutions through collaboration and uses consumer co-creation as one of his leading tools. Ultimately, the generation of happiness, the production of belonging and joys of bridging connections is what drives him.Photos by Nick Harborne​