Jenn and Lorenzo Trujillo knew that they wanted their wedding to be different.
The couple, who are both U.S. Army Band musicians, didn’t like the idea of a big, formal wedding.
Rather than rush the decision, the couple decided to wait a while, as they’d both been married before. They didn’t see a reason to rush through another wedding.
They applied for a marriage license, but they didn’t plan the actual ceremony for months.
Eventually, however, Jenn’s patience started to wear.
“She came to me and said, ‘We have this marriage license, when are we going to get married?’ and I said, ‘You know what? Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out,'” said Lorenzo.
Lorenzo began planning a small courthouse wedding, but it didn’t quite feel right. That’s when he came up with a novel plan: He’d organize the wedding himself—without telling Jenn any of the details.
“All along, the plan was just to do something in the next couple months, just go to the courthouse with some friends, nothing big at all,” he said. “But I didn’t think that was good enough.”
That might have been a catastrophic decision for another groom, but Lorenzo was certain that Jenn would appreciate the surprise. He ran the idea by his next-door neighbors, who agreed to help him put the wedding together.
Lorenzo decided that he’d tell the members of the wedding party, but no one else—and yes, that included the bride. He says that everyone involved with the wedding asked him the same question: Are you sure she’ll be okay with this?
One Friday night, Lorenzo put his plan into action.
“I told her to go buy a new dress for this date because we got tickets to this event that are really hard to get, so we have to look nice,” he said.
She picked out a white dress that she could wear again at an eventual courthouse wedding—a stroke of luck, since she was, well, headed to her actual wedding.
After dinner, the couple headed to their neighbor’s house to pick up tickets for the “show.” On the way, Jenn began talking about potential wedding dates. Lorenzo kept his mouth shut.
But as they stepped into the house, Jenn immediately noticed the strings of lights adorning the hallway. That’s when her friend, Allie, handed her a bouquet.
“I looked at Lorenzo and said, ‘Wait,'” she told The Huffington Post. “”Are we really doing this right now? How did you do this?! Is this really happening?'”
It was, in fact, really happening.
The Trujillos were married in front of 20 of their closest friends.
“Everything I had envisioned came off perfectly!” Lorenzo said. “Jenn was actually surprised and didn’t guess what I was up to, all our closest friends were there and it was just the perfect, intimate wedding.”
As Jenn told The Huffington Post, Lorenzo planned the perfect wedding.
“Honestly,” she added, “he couldn’t have come up with anything better.”
