Pinterest, you beautiful, angel-faced dream crusher.
Hey there, readers. Hope you’re all doing well. I know I’ve been pretty bad about posting, but I’ve been pretty busy lately. In addition to looking at less than seven months until our wedding, we had our engagement pictures taken at the end of September. (They’re ah-maaaazing! Keep your eyes peeled for a post featuring a nice sample of pictures from our session and advice from our photographer!) The week before that, I accepted a position at a local community college, working in the area in which I interned during grad school. (Yay!)
At this point in our planning, I’m looking at all of the invitation and decoration inspiration I can find. I have a general idea of what I think would be nice (very soft, but not in an overly-feminine way, bold pops of color done tastefully, etc.), but I’ve noticed I’m guilty of something of which I’m sure about 95% of other Pinners who have “future wedding” boards are guilty.
In the back of my mind, I have this quiet fear that our wedding isn’t going to be “pretty enough.” That it wouldn’t be worthy of being featured on a wedding website or pinned as inspiration for other weddings. (Definitely not why I started this blog, by the way.) Hurricane vases wrapped just-so with burlap and ribbon? Gorgeous. Perfectly coordinated pocket-fold invitation suites? Classy. Old frames turned into chalk boards for seating lists? So creative. Monogrammed everything? Ok, that might be crossing a line.
If any of those things are “you,” that’s cool. I want to make pocket-fold invitations for the wedding. I think the biggest offenders are “wedding style shoots,” when a photographer brings together a team of stylists, models, and other designers to create a fake, miniature wedding. They can take the time to put in an absurd amount of detail into each shot, and its likely that they have the budget to put together something quite luxurious. These shoots are beautiful, but not realistic.
I feel like Pinterest, while an amazing tool to keep your ideas and resources organized and find inspiration, can put undue pressure on a bride to create the picture-perfect day. I’m not saying its impossible for a thrifty bride to recreate a look that originally had a much higher price tag, but there’s no denying that a lot of things on there are probably fairly expensive. Besides, some couples might be intimidated by taking on overwhelming DIY to cover each intricate detail that, in the end, may go unnoticed. I worry that if I don’t cover every single aspect of the wedding, it won’t be as nice. Someone will notice that something is off, or I’ll look back at our photos and be disappointed in how it all looked, because in my head, I’ve imagined that it was all lovely, only to find maybe it wasn’t.
That’s where the problem lies. Of course we’ll have a beautiful wedding. Everything will turn out just wonderfully, and that’s because I’m marrying Brian. I know that as long as we’re married at the end of the day, that’s really all that matters.
Still… I don’t think it’s so terrible that I truly want everything to be nice. You see, I’m a super Type-A perfectionist with control freak tendencies from time to time. I can admit all that. Maybe I’m not that bad, but I think I have the potential to be. Perhaps I’m a little too concerned with appearances sometimes, but I just like to think I have very high standards for myself. I know what I’m capable of in terms of making things and designing things, so I like the challenge of doing better than the last time. Why wouldn’t I want to very best for us on the most important day of our lives?
Someone will just have to remind me to take the time on our wedding day to take everything in. If something doesn’t happen or look just right, I’m probably going to be the only person who knows about it. I know our photographers will make the pictures look amazing, and I’ll feel better about how it all looks. In the meantime, I just have to believe in Team Twyf & BWils’ (aka, us, my mom, my bridesmaids, and a few other people) abilities to make stuff look awesome, and not worry about other stuff on Pinterest that wouldn’t make sense for our wedding anyway.
via FearlessMen.com
Life of Twyf 