The post I am referring to is this one, from the brilliant a Los Angeles Love. Becca at LAL is having a cool as hell wedding, with a DJ they love and food trucks and plants on the table and a lovely dress - and they are doing all of it between the two of them. Essentially it sounds like a massive party with a wedding at the centre, which is a model we are certainly aspiring to. Every time, I read this blog I find my confidence growing.
But today's post was all about the wobbles. About 'what the wedding won't be.' There won't be paper pom poms and bits of ephemera to photograph, and this bothers Becca, as it has bothered many of us in the past, myself included. There's a lot of justification for what there will not be and it reads like a post where she is rather exorcising these images from her brain. Begone, Martha Stewart! Get your stinking crafts out of my face! I'll do as I damn well please!
It's a sentiment I can get behind. I've felt it myself - weddingprettyoverload. The 'if I see another 1970s-tinted picture of a beautiful thin girl standing in an arty room looking wistful and showing us her shoes i am going to goddamn scream' feeling. That's not to say I don't like this stuff.
But my point is this - if even Becca, who is having a cool as hell wedding and showing people like me how to be confident - if even this lady gets these wobbles, then why? Who is torturing us? Who is forcing these pictures down our throats? Who is telling us that if we don't have crepe paper pom poms and artfully sourced bit of vintage then we will not be pretty enough? I am having a bit of a rerun of the end of this post, where I feel like the consumption of wedding magazines and blog is harming my sense of perspective.
Of course, the answer is that it is us. We are doing this to ourselves - we are reading the posts about the weddings of others and every time we do so, we mourn a little bit for the wedding we aren't going to have.
It is a form og torture - we are making ourselves feel a little more insignificant and going a little crazier every day. We know we can't do it all but all we do is make a decision and then challenge it, repeatedly, by looking at 'what we could have won' (wow, worked a 'Bullseye' reference into a wedding blog).
When we took our parents to see the venue, both sets said the same thing: we wish we could have been married somewhere like this. But neither of them were. One set married in a church hall a few weeks after one partner's redundancy (and cancelling almost EVERYTHING) and the other set married in a war zone. They had no pom poms, no luxury of months of organising, poring over blogs and magazines. They just did it with what they had, which is all you can do. Part of me feels embarrassed by the riches of time and choice at our disposal. We've got to find other ways to fill it than by torturing ourselves.
We do what we do, and we do it because that's us. That's it.
Posts
Brilliant. I totally agree. I hinted at it in my last post and you perfectly expanded on what I have been suspecting for ages. It's like when women read beauty magazines and then feel bad about themselves. It makes no sense.
ReplyDelete