America loves weddings, there’s no denying it. In 2016, weddings as an industry were worth 72 billion dollars. That’s a lot of white folding chairs and birdseed, if you know what I mean. Recently, Marriage Inc. released a report detailing their analysis of over 50 years of weddings. In all this data, there were a few nuggets of wedding wisdom. While some of these findings were obvious, such as the shorter the ceremony the better, others were less obvious, like inviting a wild card guest to spice things up. However, the most interesting to us and what we wanted to explore further was this: the deeper into the woods your wedding venue the better the wedding will be.

According to the report, with over 1 million wedding guests surveyed, the surprising outlier that differentiated good weddings from bad was simply how deep into the woods the venue was. One reviewer summed it up simply, “I love going deep into the woods to witness a friend’s love, it makes the whole thing feel like weird dream. That’s a compliment, by the way.”

A weird dream indeed. It wasn’t until we had combed through most of the report before we started to pick up on the repeated use of this term. For some unexplainable reason, over 100,000 people used the phrase “weird dream” to describe deep forest weddings. We attempted to reach out to even a few of these people, but all of them were forced to confidentiality. After all, this is Marriage Inc. we’re talking about here. They have an A+ with the Better Business Bureau. They don’t mess around.

What could that possibly mean? And why was it such a common phrase? I mean, I have definitely had that moment where I am in a new place and it feels dreamlike, but I would then quickly get over it and move on with my life, realizing that it wasn’t a dream. I have never left an experience that I participated in with my own flesh and blood and thought, “Huh, maybe that didn’t happen. Maybe it was just a weird dream.” But what do I know.

Am I not living my life to the fullest? Should my every day life have more moments where I can’t separate the real from the subconscious? Actually this is sounding pretty great. I need to do more with my life in this regard.

If anyone wants to have a guaranteed dope wedding in the deep, deep woods, please shoot me an invite. I need to know what’s going on out there, it seems magical. In fact, make your wedding so deep in the woods that no one can even find it. Force us to confront nature and survive. I can’t think of anything better.

This was written by the ol’ whodunsit himself, Nathan Ellwood. Follow him if you please @NPEllwood.