Introvert wedding survival guide for shy or socially anxious couples
I’m in love with love and I love weddings. You’d think, then, that I would have been excited about the prospect of planning my wedding when I got engaged, but I wasn’t. You see, I’m an introvert, and I’m closer to the extreme end of the spectrum. So, the idea of not only going to a party, but of planning a party in honor of my fiancé (who is also an introvert, albeit more social than I am) and me made us both want to run away screaming. After much reflection, however (see definition above), I came to a few conclusions that I thought I’d share in the hopes of helping fellow introverts deal with the idea of a wedding in their honor…
Dear Bridal Industry, we need to talk about “looking pretty” on our wedding day
Dear Bridal Industry, I will not allow myself to become caught up in your ideals of what a bride “should” look like. I will not become sucked into your standards of beauty, ones that are different from my own. I will not let you dictate to me what pretty is, and isn’t.
Speaking of which, here are more things I refuse to do…
My barn wedding is not a unique and special snowflake… and that’s okay!
I fancy myself an individual. I mean, I reckon we all do. And while no one has been shaped by the same life events I have, the concept of truly being “unique” is one that we rest a lot of importance on. I always figured I wouldn’t have a “typical” wedding. I’m a modest, geeky, tomboy of a girl, and I felt a good guideline for planning a wedding would be incorporating things that make me happy. I didn’t know jack about weddings when I started out planning for all this. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the things that make me happy also make other people happy.
Not every wedding choice has to “mean something”
I see this attitude a lot, about weddings, where everything is “supposed to mean something.” Before we got engaged, I had this grand notion that every little choice that we made about our wedding was going to be somehow representative of us. Now I can’t imagine doing that without going crazy from the stress.