First Comes Marriage. Then Comes the Rehearsal Dinner.

Harrison Chad and Charlotte Marks, a couple in Park Slope in Brooklyn, have been guests at numerous weddings. Their takeaway was that the traditional structure — a rehearsal dinner the first night and the ceremony and reception the next — was flawed.

It seemed to them that many brides and grooms couldn’t be present or relax until the ceremony was over.

“There is so much pressure building up to the day of your wedding,” said Mr. Chad, 32, who runs social-emotional learning programs in camps around the country. “At the rehearsal dinner and then all day before the wedding, people are asking the groom, ‘How are you? How are you holding up? Are you ready?’ It’s a lot.”

They also noticed that guests regularly seem to overdo it the first evening. “I’ve been to so many weddings where people go all out at the rehearsal dinner because they are so excited and so jazzed to celebrate,” said Ms. Marks, 32, who runs an education startup.

So for their wedding weekend, taking place at the end of this month, they’re changing things around.

The couple are hosting the ceremony and reception the first night, a Thursday, at a Japanese restaurant in the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn for 172 people. “It’s the whole thing: the ceremony, the cocktail hour, the dinner, the speeches, the dances, the hora,” Mr. Chad said.