“Strongest Person at the Wedding”: Adding a fun, personal touch to your Hawaii wedding

In a recent conversation with Diego & Eleanor, who are having their Hawaii wedding later this month at Moana Surfrider Westin Resort, Diego had mentioned that one of his favorite pastimes was watching The World’s Strongest Man Competition on ESPN.

If you’re not familiar with The World’s Strongest Man Competition, the premise of the show is that the producers are looking for the World’s Strongest Man. To determine this, participants are given several challenges that only a Strong Man can do, like pulling dump trucks, lifting two-ton boulders, and running a time trial race while carrying weights over their shoulder. Losers get eliminated over the course of the show until only one is left–the World’s Strongest Man. That sounds like a fun enough thing to enjoy, so I thought about how to incorporate that into their wedding.

We came up with this creative activity that will happen starting at dinner and run throughout the reception, an alternative to tapping the glasses to get the newlyweds to kiss:

To prepare for this event, I will bring a 10-20 lb dumbbell weight to the reception and leave it near the stage.

If guests want to see the newlyweds kiss, instead of tapping their glasses, a guest must come to the stage and hold the dumbbell in front of her, with her arms forward and straight. If the guest is successful, Diego & Eleanor would kiss! It’s really that simple.

What makes this activity fun is the twist that is thrown in: the longer you hold out the weight, the longer the kiss will be. So if you can hold it out for a few seconds, Diego & Eleanor will kiss for a few seconds. If you hold it out for a minute, they’ll kiss for a minute. If you hold it out for longer, then we may be there the whole night!

Diego & Eleanor love the idea! We can’t wait to see how it will turn out at the wedding, and I’m certain the guests (especially his guy friends, whom Diego tells me are quite competitive) will get a kick out of it.