As I shared late last year, Pinterest was invented literally one month after I got married, so I didn’t plan my wedding with boards I shared with my bridesmaids, and wedding blogs were still a fairly new trend in the industry, so I didn’t spend hours perusing Style Me Pretty (which was two years old at the time of my wedding) or Le Magnifique (which hadn’t yet been started on my wedding date . . . because, in fact, the founding editor also was busy getting married on my wedding date). If Pinterest had been around, or if I’d had a better idea of everything that was out there in the wedding blog world, I would have spent countless hours pouring over them.

Which would have been both a good and a bad thing. The good:

Pinterest and wedding blogs give brides new ideas they might not have considered, help brides determine what they want and don’t want for their own weddings, and offer brides a great way to organize their favorite wedding inspiration online.

The bad:

Pinterest and wedding blogs set the bar really high for brides when it comes to how many intricate wedding details they should have at their weddings, drive and perpetuate trends at the expense of individuality, and cultivate a wedding culture of replicating other brides’ weddings rather than creating something unique and highly personalized.

So, brides-to-be — when you see something you like (and you see it again and again and again) online, before you add it to your wedding day checklist, pause and ask yourself what it means to you. Ask yourself how it will enhance your wedding celebration, and later on, your wedding memories.

And if you can’t give yourself a compelling answer why you want something included in your wedding, I have a simple suggestion for you: Skip it.

You have enough on your plate, what with planning a wedding and preparing for marriage; you don’t need to add on to your wedding tasks just because you’ve seen that hundreds of other brides have done this/created that/included this/made time for that.
A wedding is supposed to be an incredible day — but simply putting together a beautiful or cute or on-trend party isn’t incredible, and as life goes on and gets ever busier with children and work and mortgages, you’ll forget the little details you slaved over if they didn’t mean anything special to you. Celebrating the start of your marriage with a wedding that accurately reflects you — that’s incredible, and you will remember it so fondly in the decades to come.

~ Laura