From asking for time off two days before the ceremony to letting her nephews choose their first meal as newlyweds, Kristen Whitaker did her wedding entirely her own way

NEED TO KNOW

• Kristen and Nathan Whitaker decided to get married after Nathan unexpectedly had a Wednesday off, giving them just two days to pull their courthouse wedding together
• The unconventional day included a $20 dress, borrowed heels, a bouquet made by a co-worker, a two-mile walk to the courthouse and burgers chosen by their nephews
• Now a mom, Kristen says she understands her own mother’s wedding-day worries differently, but still wouldn’t change a single thing about how she and Nathan got married

Kristen Whitaker didn’t spend months planning her wedding, obsessing over a seating chart or searching for the perfect dress. On a Monday, she asked her boss if she could have Wednesday off to get married, and two days later, she and Nathan Whitaker were headed to the courthouse.

“The decision to get married on a whim was as natural for us as everything else had been,” Kristen, 30, tells PEOPLE exclusively. After about 10 months of dating, she says there was really only one thought on their minds: “I don’t want to spend another day not married to you.”

Nathan, also 30, had a harder time getting days off at the last minute than Kristen did, so when he unexpectedly had a Wednesday free, the couple jumped at the opportunity. Kristen, a sonographer, got the day off too, setting their decidedly untraditional wedding into motion.

There wasn’t much time for the details people can spend months obsessing over, but that hardly mattered to Kristen. Her actual engagement ring arrived Tuesday night, just hours before she was set to become Nathan’s wife.

Years later, Kristen laid out some of the wonderfully chaotic details in a TikTok about the things she did on her wedding day that “would send a normal bride into shock.” Her dress cost $20 and was too small, but without a printer to print a return label, she simply went with it.

Her shoes were borrowed from her sister-in-law and eventually made her feet bleed, while her bouquet came courtesy of a coworker she’d known for only a month. The coworker, Kristen, made sure to note in the video, “ROCKED it.”

Then there was the journey to the courthouse itself. Kristen’s dad accidentally parked two miles away, meaning Nathan’s first look at his bride came after she had made the trek sweaty and out of breath.

Still, none of those mishaps managed to rattle her. Kristen says knowing exactly why she was there made everything else feel remarkably unimportant.

“I was as unfazed as they come that day because even if I was busting out of my dress, having feet covered in blood, and sweat all the hairspray off my head, the day was ending with spending the rest of my life laughing about it with my husband,” she says. “I knew every weird quirk didn’t truly matter because I was marrying my best friend.”

In fact, Kristen says her biggest dilemma of the day came after the ceremony. The newlyweds let their nephews choose where they would eat their first meal as husband and wife, leaving Kristen with what she described on TikTok as “the greasiest burger known to man” and a Diet Coke.

“I would say the only true stress I felt that day was debating which burger to get at the restaurant!” she jokes. Amid all the funny details, however, there was one quieter wedding-day tradition that had years of history behind it.

When Kristen and Nathan were dating long-distance, she would leave little notes for him before she had to go home. The first, written on an old Progressive mail ad, still hangs in their dining room today.

On their wedding day, Kristen found a piece of scratch paper in their garage and wrote another note, secretly tucking it inside Nathan’s suit jacket. He has carried it in his wallet ever since.

The couple’s decision to keep their wedding simple wasn’t necessarily embraced by everyone around them at first. Kristen says plenty of people tried to convince them to have a big celebration, something both of their parents had done themselves.

Kristen admits she and Nathan love “tearing up the dance floor” at other people’s weddings, but neither enjoys being the center of attention. Rather than build their day around what everyone else expected, they decided the only opinions that really mattered were their own.

“We didn’t feel the need to appease anyone but each other,” Kristen says. “I think the biggest lesson we learned on our wedding day was to tune out all of the noise of other people’s opinions and just listen to each other.”

Now that Kristen is a mother herself, there is one part of that Wednesday she understands differently. She remembers inviting her mom over that morning and watching as she fretted about making sure everything was right, while Kristen repeatedly told her to calm down.

“I told her she just needed to calm down, but now I understand she just wanted me to be happy,” Kristen says. Looking through the photos today also gives her a glimpse of the younger couple who chose a wedding that made sense to them, even if it surprised everyone else.

“When I look back at pictures from that day, I laugh because we were just a couple kids in love doing things the way we wanted to,” she says. “I’m so proud of us.”

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The too-small dress, bloody feet, two-mile walk and greasy burger have since become pieces of a family story rather than wedding-day disasters. Kristen says she wouldn’t erase any of them, even if she had the chance to plan the day all over again.

“There isn’t a single thing I would change about our wedding day,” she says. “It was silly, fun and above all else so full of love. It was genuinely a perfect representation of our marriage.”

And her advice for another bride feeling buried beneath expectations is fittingly simple. “Life is so short, and your wedding is only one day of it,” Kristen says.

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