Jennifer Allen has been trained to adjust on the fly. The business owner of Just Elope still works a full-time job in addition to being a mother and wife.
Recently, she recounted the personal experience that inspired her business.
How did Just Elope come about?
Back in 2,010, my boyfriend proposed. He was leaving for deployment five days later, so we were trying to find a company that could marry us on short notice so we wouldn’t have to go to city hall. Unfortunately in Dallas in 2010, that did not exist. So we end up getting married at city hall after the judge helped somebody with their driver’s license. It was very unromantic.
Fast-forward to 2017 after years of saying, “We’ll do a vow renewal. We’ll do this. We’ll do that so that we could have that experience,” it never happened. We had kids, so it just never happened for us.
That made me say, “I want to create an experience for other brides and grooms, so they never have to schedule to go to city hall or run off to Vegas. There has to be some type of local option,” and Just Elope was born.
What three pieces of advice do you have for couples who want to elope?
Number one is to let it be a decision that you are comfortable with. If you never had another wedding, so many couples say, “Oh. We’re going to do something small, and then do something big later.” Sometimes that later never comes. So you need to make a great decision the first time.
My second piece of advice would be to be confident in your decision. The two of you making this choice, this is your first choice going forward as man and wife. Stand firm in it. Some people are not going to agree with what you want to do, and that is OK.
My third piece of advice would be to make sure you still make your day special. Get your hair done, get your nails done, get a beautiful dress, go get a massage and plan a little vacation. Just do something to make the day memorable. Don’t go into it thinking, “You know what, later on, we’ll do something else” because you never know what life is going to bring you.
How do you balance everything?
Honestly, there is no such thing as balance. I look at life in two sections: You have your glass and you have your plastic.
Some days, my business is glass, which means I cannot drop it. If I drop it, it’s going [to] shatter, and I’ll never be able to fix it, which means that my family that day is plastic. That may look like, “We’re eating McDonald’s for dinner or peanut butter and jelly.” Something quick versus my son having a musical and he has a solo. Oh. I was not missing that, so everything else is plastic. That is really how I just gauge day-to-day.
