NEW YORK — In a phone-toting, social media-mad age, you might think trying to keep your wedding offline would be crazy.

Yet we did just that. We asked our guests to stay off their phones during our ceremony and other key moments. In doing so, we were hoping to make the celebration more enjoyable for everyone.

As fun as smart phones, Facebook and Instagram are, they've turned us into part-time documentarians. We think about how to photograph something as soon as we see it. And we distance ourselves from the feelings that go along with these moments.

“Everyone is kind of watching your entire big moment in life through a little 5-inch screen,” said Lizzie Post, a great-great-granddaughter of etiquette expert Emily Post and president of the Emily Post Institute. “We're not really in the moment. We're recording the moment.”

That's why my then-fiancée Amber Marlow knew what she wanted: an unplugged wedding, in which you ask guests to put away their phones for all or part of the festivities. She's a wedding photographer, and she's been recommending that clients go unplugged for years.

The fact that “put your phones away” is a style of wedding instead of an obvious point shows how much mobile phones have altered even the most emotional moments of our lives.

And as we worked to spread the word and plan our wedding, we learned even more about our relationship with technology — 'til death, or logging out, do us part.

Smart phones have become an all-or-nothing phenomenon: When one person at the table pulls out a phone, everyone else takes it as permission to do the same. Sometimes people start giving advice and tech support. The next thing you know, everyone is checking texts and social media.

Not to mention those horrible photos we regret the next morning. It's incredibly easy to take photos with your phone, which means it's incredibly easy to shoot subjects looking terrible, utterly intoxicated or twice their actual age.