The New York Times recently ran an article called Your Hand in Marriage, and Offbeat Bride got a nod for our DIY posts. That’s cool, but what really caught my eye was this quote from a bride named Lauren Ireland:
“I felt like there’s such a movement to homogeneous wedding styles with Pinterest and Etsy, which are wonderful tools but do seem to make things seem very similar,” she said.Her wedding, she added, represented “not an effort to be unique, but an effort to be us.”
I’ve been writing about this concept for years… Your wedding is not a contest (2007) and Why I worry when people say they want a unique wedding (2009) are just two examples. It’s important to repeat, however, because I worry about the never-ending drive to be “offbeat enough” or perfectly whimsical or impeccably quirky.
I worry about couples pushing themselves so hard for external validation through their weddings. Validation-seeking is difficult, and the whole idea with starting Offbeat Bride was an effort to lessen wedding stress — not to increase the pressure to do it “right” in some sort of extremely unique, never-seen-before way. I love you guys, and I don’t want you stressing out!
For some of us, weddings can be a really lovely way to express our true (and truly weird) selves. For others, we just want to get ‘er done. Both these approaches to weddings are valid. Both of them are lovely. Both of them are weddings we’ve featured on this site.
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Wedding planning takes effort, and of course with that investment of effort comes an investment of ourselves in the process. It’s exciting and expensive and overwhelming. It’s a perfect soup of big life shift, family dynamics, financial pressures, and cultural influences. You get absorbed by it (I love every single pop culture reference ever!), or you push against it (I am more than a bride! Fuck this!). Sometimes you do both within a few minutes.
My goal with Offbeat Bride has always just been to create a supportive, inclusive corner of the internet where people can comfortably enthuse over the process of planning a wedding. My goal has never been to be an enforcer of taste, a pusher of quirk, or a policeman of proper offbeatness. We’re all just stumbling around, and my hope is that readers here feel supported and encouraged through their stumbling — never pressured to be anything they’re not.
Like the rest of the Offbeat Empire, the mission on Offbeat Bride is to support our readers in expressing their most authentic selves. Whether that’s a courthouse elopement, easy-peasy package wedding on a beach, or a disorientingly strange theatrical freakfest commitment ceremony, we want you to feel good about it.
…Not necessarily because it’s unique, but because it’s YOURS.
