Eloping in Maine or New Hampshire? Your Wedding Can Be Smaller Without Feeling Less Important

A thoughtfully designed elopement can give you the ceremony, photographs, experience, and meaning of a wedding… without building the entire day around everyone else

There is a persistent idea that an elopement is what couples choose when they want to avoid having a “real wedding,” but some of the most intentional weddings I have witnessed have involved only two people, an officiant, a beautiful place, and enough time to actually experience what was happening.

An elopement does not have to mean rushing to a courthouse, sacrificing beautiful photographs, or quietly getting married before returning to ordinary life. In Maine and New Hampshire especially, it can mean exchanging vows beside the ocean, on a family property, in the mountains, at an inn, beside a lake, in a garden, or somewhere that matters enormously to the two of you without needing to transform that place into a traditional wedding venue.

I am Rebecca Pinkham Stevenson, founder and Creative Director of The Beaux & Arrows Collective, and together with my husband, Jacob Stevenson, I offer elopement experiences designed for couples who want something intimate without making it insignificant. Because Jacob can officiate weddings in Maine and New Hampshire, we can combine ceremony guidance, personalized vow support, officiating, photography, planning assistance, and creative direction into an unusually simple experience with far fewer moving pieces for the couple to coordinate.

Is an elopement right for you if you still want your wedding to feel special?

Absolutely, because the significance of a wedding has very little to do with the number of chairs facing the ceremony.

For some couples, removing a large guest list actually creates room for considerably more intention. Instead of spending the morning answering questions from vendors, worrying about seating arrangements, watching the clock, greeting dozens or hundreds of guests, and trying to remain present while an enormous production unfolds around them, you can design the day around what the two of you actually want to remember.

That might mean getting ready slowly at a beautiful inn, exchanging private letters before the ceremony, driving somewhere spectacular for your vows, having champagne afterward, walking the shoreline at sunset, eating an extraordinary dinner, or spending the rest of the evening somewhere you love.

The wedding becomes less about managing an event and more about experiencing your marriage beginning.

What is actually included in an elopement package?

An elopement should not feel as though you purchased a photographer for an hour and now need to assemble the rest of the wedding yourself.

My elopement packages can be built around the amount of support you actually need, with photography at the center and the ability to incorporate ceremony planning, location guidance, timeline development, wardrobe and styling recommendations, personalized vow support, officiating by Jacob, portrait planning, and guidance surrounding the little logistical decisions that become surprisingly important once you begin planning.

For couples who want something beautifully simple, that may mean helping you choose a location, establishing the best time for light, creating a ceremony plan, photographing the preparations and vows, signing the necessary paperwork, and spending the remainder of our time making portraits somewhere extraordinary.

For couples who want more of a wedding day, we can build a longer experience around getting ready, first looks, vows, family photographs, multiple locations, dinner, cake, champagne, or whatever traditions you genuinely want to preserve.

The point is not to remove everything associated with a wedding.

It is to remove the things that do not matter to you.

Why have a photographer and officiant who already work together?

Because simplicity becomes particularly valuable when you are planning an intimate wedding.

Jacob and I already understand how the other works, which allows the ceremony and photography to function together rather than compete with one another. He understands when I need a moment to make a photograph, where we should position a ceremony for beautiful light when circumstances allow, and how to create a ceremony that feels meaningful without unnecessarily prolonging it for the sake of tradition.

From the couple's perspective, this can also mean fewer vendors to locate, interview, schedule, coordinate, and communicate with.

There is something especially lovely about arriving at your elopement knowing that the people responsible for marrying you and preserving the experience already know how to work as a team.

What if you do not know where you want to elope?

That is completely fine, because choosing the location can become part of designing the experience.

Maine and New Hampshire offer an extraordinary range of environments within a relatively small geographic area, including rocky coastline, quiet beaches, islands, mountains, lakes, forests, historic inns, private estates, gardens, farms, and small New England towns that feel completely different depending on the season.

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Instead of beginning with a list of popular locations, I prefer to understand what you want the day to feel like. Someone imagining bare feet, wind, champagne, and the Atlantic is describing an entirely different wedding from a couple imagining wool coats, mountains, snow, and a fireplace afterward.

Once we know the feeling, we can begin finding the place.

Can you invite your family and still call it an elopement?

Of course.

Modern elopements exist on a spectrum between a completely private ceremony and a very small wedding, and there is no meaningful reason to exclude the people you genuinely want beside you simply because you have chosen an intimate format.

Parents, children, siblings, grandparents, or a handful of close friends can be incorporated beautifully while preserving the simplicity that attracted you to eloping in the first place.

The more useful question is whether the guest list supports the experience you want or begins recreating the obligations you were trying to avoid.

What if you still want beautiful wedding details?

Please have them.

An intimate wedding does not require an intimate level of effort.

Wear the extraordinary dress. Carry the flowers. Have your hair and makeup done. Order the cake from your favorite bakery. Wear your grandmother's jewelry. Buy beautiful stationery for handwritten vows. Reserve the exceptional hotel room. Hire a private chef. Bring champagne and crystal glasses onto the beach if the location permits it.

You are allowed to have the parts of a traditional wedding that make you happy without purchasing all of the others along with them.

In fact, couples who choose smaller celebrations can sometimes redirect their wedding budget toward fewer but much more exceptional details, creating an experience that feels luxurious precisely because resources are not being divided among hundreds of people.

What if you want to write your own vows but have no idea where to begin?

This is one of the places where having support can make an enormous difference.

Personal vows do not need to sound like literature, and they certainly do not need to sound like something copied from the internet. They should sound like the person your partner knows speaking directly to them.

Jacob can help couples develop vows that remain authentically theirs while providing enough structure that neither person is staring at a blank page the night before the wedding. We can also discuss whether you want personal vows spoken during the ceremony, exchanged privately beforehand, written as letters, or incorporated into another part of the day.

There are many ways to make vows deeply personal without making two private people perform their relationship for an audience.

How much photography do you actually need for an elopement?

That depends much more on the experience you want documented than on the number of guests attending.

A two person wedding can still contain getting ready photographs, details, first looks, private letters, travel to the ceremony, vows, rings, portraits, family photographs, champagne, dinner, multiple locations, and the quiet moments between all of those things.

Conversely, a couple who wants a beautifully simple ceremony followed by portraits may need considerably less coverage.

I prefer to work backward from the story rather than beginning with an arbitrary number of hours. Tell me what you imagine remembering, and we can determine how much time allows those photographs to happen without turning the day into a photography marathon.

What happens if Maine or New Hampshire weather refuses to cooperate?

Then we remember where we decided to get married.

New England weather is part of the landscape, particularly along the coast and in the mountains, and some of the most atmospheric photographs happen when the day is not perfectly sunny.

Fog can be beautiful. Wind creates movement. Clouds soften light. Snow completely transforms a landscape, and even a gray coastal afternoon can produce photographs with an extraordinary sense of place.

Obviously, severe or dangerous weather is different, and practical backup planning matters, but I do not believe a wedding day needs blue skies to be beautiful.

Sometimes the weather you would never have ordered becomes part of what makes the photographs impossible to recreate.

Is an elopement less meaningful than a traditional wedding?

Not remotely.

The vows are still vows. The commitment is still a commitment. The photographs will still become part of your family's history, and the person standing across from you is still the person with whom you are choosing to build your life.

What changes is the scale surrounding that moment.

An elopement gives you permission to remove almost everything except the marriage itself and then thoughtfully add back only the pieces that matter to you.

For some couples, that means two people standing beside the Atlantic.

For others, it means ten people gathered at a family home, a ceremony in the White Mountains followed by dinner at an inn, or vows beside a Maine lake with their children standing beside them.

There is no requirement that one version be more legitimate than another.

Your wedding does not need to be enormous to become one of the biggest days of your life.

That is ultimately what I want couples considering an elopement to understand.

You are not choosing a lesser wedding because you chose fewer guests, fewer vendors, or fewer traditions. You are choosing where to place the attention, and when the production becomes smaller, the marriage itself often becomes much easier to see.

My job is to help you create enough structure that the day feels effortless, enough beauty that it feels extraordinary, and photographs that allow you to return to it long after the vows have been spoken.

Jacob's job is to make sure that somewhere in the middle of all of that beauty, you actually get married.

And together, we can create a Maine or New Hampshire elopement that feels less like an abbreviated version of somebody else's wedding and much more like the beginning of your own marriage.

The Beaux & Arrows Collective
Maine + New Hampshire Elopements
Photography • Officiating • Vow Support • Planning & Creative Direction

Small by design. Significant by every measure.