“Not an effort to be unique, but an effort to be us”
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.”
Wedding stress: why is everyone stressed out but me?
I had an almost “Anti-Bridezilla” moment — “I don’t care which shade of teal they are! If I’m not dealing with wedding stress, why is everyone else stressing?!”
This is some powerful shit: the wedding planning process as a rite of passage
When my love and I decided to start wedding planning back in January, we had NO IDEA what we were getting into. I honestly thought that as a new bride, the “collective community” would gently take my hand, congratulate me on this sacred time in my life, and ask me questions that would invoke my heart space to create my wedding day.
Is it possible to have a feminist wedding?
I have a Masters in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In other words, I’m a professional feminist. I had been with my partner for ten years when he proposed, and while it somehow came as a shock, there was no doubt in my mind that I absolutely wanted to marry him. Like any crafty member of my generation would, I desperately started googling “feminist wedding,” a fruitless endeavor. So what was going on? My entire identity had been built around feminism, so why was it that I was contradicting my own beliefs?