Reclaim Your Wedding

Hillary Robson knows wedding planning. As a Nashville floral and event designer who owns Brocade Design Arts and blogs at The Renegade Bride (renegadebride.wordpress.com), Hillary has been involved in more than 100 weddings.
From the flowers to the lighting schemes and custom paper designs, Hillary helps brides get exactly what they want. When it came to planning her own wedding—slated for June 2011—with her fiancé Don, it would seem that it was business as usual for the talented designer.

The couple agreed on a traditional ceremony at St. Patrick Catholic Church and booked the Cannery Ballroom for a fun yet elegant reception. Hillary chose the lighting, the linens and began making plans for the centerpieces. But somewhere between the save-the-dates and the bamboo charger plates, a strange thing started to happen: Hillary wasn’t enjoying being a bride. 

Selecting local vendors was agonizing. Hillary knew them all, and she didn’t want to step on any toes. An internal pressure took hold. Because she and her fiancé are both in the wedding industry—he’s a wedding photographer—Hillary felt there was a certain standard to uphold. She became consumed with ensuring that every element was perfect, so much so that she admittedly focused completely on the wedding planning instead of planning for married life.

When the original guest list ballooned from 80 to almost 200, Hillary felt nearly powerless to stop it. Her fiancé has a large family, and she didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Soon she felt as if she were planning the wedding of another bride, rather than her own. “It felt like an out-of-body experience,” she says. “It took away from the feeling that it was truly mine.”

When she received an email with more guests to add to the list, she knew something had to give—if not for her sanity, for her budget. “It was at the point that we couldn’t pretend it was a fantasy with no consequences,” Hillary says. “We got caught up trying to make everybody happy, and there isn’t really any way to do that.”

Amid all of that stress, Hillary and Don were working at a Nashville reception for clients who had been married in Hawaii. After viewing the couple’s beachside photographs, Don turned to Hillary and said, “We should get married in Hawaii.”

Hillary took a look at what her wedding was becoming—this thing that had taken on a life of its own, carrying with it pressures to please and to meet stringent standards.
Then she broke up with her wedding.

Hillary had encountered the dirty little secret that many brides experience, but few ever talk about: Your wedding can make you feel pretty bad, especially if it’s not a true reflection of what’s right for you. Hillary had to pull back the curtain on the feelings of fear, pressure and anxiety to take a good look at who she was planning the wedding for. Once she did, she knew she had to reclaim her wedding.

When offering advice about wedding planning, friends who have walked down the aisle often talk openly—OK, effusively—about each minute detail of their big days. But few will tell you that your wedding can be a minefield of emotions that is anything but blissful.
Whether you’re feeling inferior because of your budget, cursing your inability to channel Martha Stewart, or worrying that the event won’t live up to expectations, you’re not crazy. And you’re certainly not alone.

Graphic designer Natosha Benning, who writes about her wedding and newlywed life at her blog Big Spoon Little Spoon (bigspoon-littlespoon.blogspot.com), spent 18 months planning her October 2010 wedding at Rose Mont Mansion. Given her creative inclination, Natosha spent much of that time on a long list of DIY projects.

Natosha created invitations, programs, reception décor, the guestbook, favor bags, cufflinks for the groomsmen, and handkerchiefs for the bridesmaids, just to name a few. Despite all of her artistic talent, she hesitated to post photos of her wedding invites on her blog because she was unsure of how they’d be perceived by her designer friends.
As she was crafting, she often found herself worrying that guests might find her creations tacky. All of the blogs she turned to for wedding inspiration—also known as “wedding porn”—only intensified the need to be perfect.

Marie McKinney-Oates, a Nashville premarital counselor, says that for many brides, such worries are only exacerbated by the feeling that you—and the many plans you’ve made—are on display for everyone to critique on your big day. “There is no way to avoid that pressure,” she says. “It’s about knowing how to handle it in the best way possible and not letting it take over your life.”

One way to avoid that takeover? Limit wedding porn consumption. Yes, you’re going to spend hours online drooling over photos of strangers’ picture-perfect weddings in the name of research, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy into the fantasy.
 
McKinney-Oates suggests that you look at wedding porn the same way you do magazine airbrushing: with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you actually attended a blog-worthy wedding, she says you’d find that the whole event isn’t as perfectly staged as those few detail shots you’ve bookmarked.

Of course, DIY brides aren’t the only ones feeling the pressure. Ask a feminist bride who felt the need to defend her decision to be walked down the aisle or an alterna-bride who was sheepish about longing for a white dress, and you’ll find that wedding anxiety—and the need to please and to be understood—doesn’t discriminate.

How can you stop agonizing over the expectations of others and become empowered to plan a wedding that is an authentic reflection of who you and your groom are as a couple? Realize that your wedding is not a contest.

Whether you worry that your wedding is not grand enough, not feminist enough or not DIY enough, these feelings all have one common denominator: the fear that your wedding is not enough.

Looking back, even though her wedding may not have been wedding porn-ready, Natosha is proud that it was tailored to who she and her husband are as a couple. “If you keep the celebration in mind and why you’re getting married in the first place, a lot of this stuff ceases to matter over time,” she says.

McKinney-Oates advises that your wedding should be anchored in who you are as a couple. After all, once you’ve made your big getaway, would you rather have guests say, “that wedding was impressive” or “that wedding was so them?"

If you want your wedding to stand as a testament to anything other than your love and commitment to each other, perhaps you’ve lost your way. But it’s never too late to shift the focus—just ask Hillary. She’ll still be tying the knot in June 2011, but now she’ll be joined by less than 20 guests as she and Don are married on a cliff that overlooks the ocean in Kona.

Where she once feared she would just be acting the part at her wedding, Hillary now feels like she and Don will be living their big day in the way they always hoped. As Hillary confesses, the couple was able to “bring the wedding back to being about us, about our relationship and about a spiritual renewal and commitment.”

Sure, she is still a smidge obsessed about the details, but when Hillary took control of her runaway wedding, she was liberated from the stress and pressure that kept her awake at night. “This wedding is a better reflection of us because it’s going to be more laid-back and relaxed,” Hillary says. “It’s going to be everything we always wanted."