Weddingbee Blog

When I looked back through my many posts as a bee, I realized that a lot of them were pretty light-hearted, even borderline shallow. I was very tempted to choose either my Facebook awkwardness post or my macaron post as my favorite, because I had the most fun writing them, but instead, I choose this one! As shallow as being a bride can appear from the outside, planning your wedding is such a thought-provoking, personally challenging, profound experience. After our wedding, I found myself to be a changed person in so many ways. This stage of my life definitely forced me to establish a stronger sense of self. This post, “Struggles with Wedding Planning and a Search for Authenticity,” really captures the inner struggle I experienced during the journey of our engagement. Looking back, nearly a year later, I am thankful that rather than becoming weaker, marrying young has made me so much stronger! I feel proud that our wedding turned out to be such an authentic representation of who Mr. Turtle and I are and what we stand for as a couple.

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Around the time we hit the six-months-before-the-wedding mark, I hit a total stumbling block with wedding planning. Wedding related tasks turned from a joy to a burden, from a happy distraction to a tiresome chore. All of the items on my to-do list suddenly seemed totally trivial, unnecessary, and even selfish. Whenever I started working on wedding stuff, I found myself thinking about all of the people in the world who don’t have food to eat or a roof over their heads, all of the people in my own town who have recently lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. And then I would look at my to-do list and see things like: “Choose chairs and linen colors. Find cute shoes. Look for veil/hairpiece. Book bakery. etc., etc., etc.” These things just seemed so frivolous to me all of a sudden.

I felt terribly guilty for not spending all of the hours I was devoting to wedding planning focusing my energy on things that are, I don’t know, more real.

We’ve been engaged for a long time, so that could have been part of it. But I finally realized that most of my hesitations, guilt, fears, and general burn-out related to planning this wedding were related to the desire that I have to be unique and original. One of my biggest pet peeves has always been copying.

It’s always bothered me when people follow trends just because they are trends. I feel like when you truly like something, it is part of your personality. You like it before it’s a trend and you continue to like it after the trend has passed. Discovering the things that you like and identify with in life is a big part of growing into your adult self and knowing what makes you who you are. When you drift from trend to trend, instead of identifying your own, unique personal style, you are so much more likely to look back on things and consider them outdated and foreign to you.

Okay, I admit that I’m probably an overly analytic person to begin with… I even analyze whether this annoyance with copying is a character flaw within myself that I need to work on. I really don’t want to come across as stuck up or elitist. However, I’ve decided that it doesn’t stem from a desire to be better than or more unique than others. It is truly a disappointment in the lack of authenticity in the world.

What I dislike more than other people copying me is when I realize that I’m copying someone else. Whenever I catch myself jumping on the bandwagon of something I’m uninformed about, I try to stop and ask myself: am I doing this/wearing this/watching this/talking about this/listening to this because I like it or because I know of other people who like it and I have a desire to be more like them? Honestly, half the time it’s the first answer, and half the time it’s the other. As cliche as it sounds, pausing points like these have really helped me understand who I really am.

And how does all of this relate to wedding planning? Well, planning a wedding is essentially copying. I don’t know much about weddings, except for the fact that I’m making a commitment to marry Mr. Turtle. So planning this wedding has mainly entailed studying up on weddings that have come before mine: those of relatives, friends, acquaintances, and people featured in movies, books, blogs, and magazines. I’ve been saving pictures of things I like for over a year now. And I guess I’ve been collecting images in my mind my whole life. Now that it’s time to stop brainstorming and start creating, I step back and look at all of these images and don’t know what to think. I’m crazy about all of them. Of course none of them are me, but some of them reflect me and some of them reflect people whose lives I think it would be fun to live.

As an art major, I’ve spent a lot of time creating in the last four years. This period of my life has really challenged me to question what I have to create that is truly original. I’ve often struggled with the idea that all of the words I write have been written before and all of the objects I create are in some way or another interpretations of what someone else has previously created. Yet at the same time, these years have helped me to begin to grasp what I have to offer as an artist and as a human being. A big key to understanding myself and having peace with my ideas and creations has been the acceptance that everything has been done before.

I’m realizing that I need to apply this idea to wedding planning. Everything is copying. Unfortunately, all of my ideas were originally stolen from somewhere. Mr. Turtle and I are not the first ones to play the songs we will play on our wedding day, but we’re probably the first to play the combination we’ve chosen. We may not be the first the say the vows we’ll say, but what matters is that it will be the first time we’ve said them. So in the same way, my bouquet might be similar to one in a magazine, and my hair and makeup may be reminiscent of an actresses look in a movie, but if within this combination of things lies me and Mr. Turtle, it will feel so wonderful!

So in conclusion, I’m moving the following to the top of my wedding planning to-do list: take a step back and look at this day we’ve been planning. Weed out the parts that don’t feel like us. It would be awesome to be the couple having the trendy loft wedding, the carefree beach wedding, the rustic elegant ranch wedding, or the glamorous ballroom wedding, but that’s not us! Once I realize that we’re the ones having the Mr. and Mrs. Turtle wedding (the one in the backyard that’s a little tight on space, with the crazy to-do list, but with the most supportive family and friends and some awesome vendors who I know will throw it all together), I feel so much better about all of this.

More than anything, I want to reconcile who Mr. Turtle and I are as a couple with the image in my head of an ideal wedding. With each wedding-related decision that I make, my goal is to ask myself not, “Is this too expensive? Will this look bad? Is this the best ____ out there?”, but “Is this choice an honest and authentic representation of who I am, who my family is, and who Mr. Turtle and I are as a couple in our everyday lives?”

Does this sound at all familiar to you? Have any of you found yourself struggling with being authentic in your wedding planning choices?