Weddingbee Blog

I’d like to take a moment to campaign for imperfection.

First, I should tell you that I expected myself to be way more neurotic and controlling about this wedding of ours. So did Pdog, who refers to my relative calm as “a pleasant surprise.” So did my friends and basically everyone who knows me. Oh sure, I still have my moments, but they’re quick, contained, and rational. I think I could fairly describe my bridal attitude as: non-obsessive. This is a shock, even to me.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I found my way to this place of pre-wedding zen. Here’s what I landed on. A few years ago, in a design internship, my boss would scrutinize my first go at a project and say, “Make it less perfect.” Throw it off a little—make it interesting. She was right, every time.

We see these more-perfect blogs and magazines, don’t we? With perfect details in perfect lighting, of brides with impossibly sculpted arms and what appears to be no pores on their face, at all. For awhile, I almost thought I cared if my wedding measured up to these carefully-chosen 10-picture spreads. But you know what? I don’t.

Because here’s the truth, my friends:

I don’t even like perfect—in anything. I like stories; I like realness; I like beautiful things with wrinkled edges, with a history deep and wide and meaningful. I read Weddingbee because this is the behind-the-scenes tour of the eventual beautiful pictures. I love reading about real couples with real ups and downs, when planning goes right and terribly wrong. I like finding connections with complete strangers and empathizing with them so deeply that tears form, hot behind my eyes. I like laughing and laughing and feeling relieved that someone across the world can feel precisely the same way as me. This is why I’m hooked on weddings—sure, I’m an aesthete to my very core—but really, I’m a moment junkie.

So I don’t want perfection on my wedding day. I really don’t. I want funny mishaps and unabashed joy, I want rising to the occasion, and I want to be arms-up spinning, with elated in-the-moment-ness. If the DJ plays the wrong first dance song, Pdog and I are going to laugh and probably make up some dance moves. If the cake topples over, if the photobooth goes with it, if Mother Nature turns on me in any number of ways: you will still find me on the dance floor with my husband.

Of course I’ve given very specific requests to my florist, my caterer, my DJ, to all my vendors. And if those details don’t happen…you know what? It’s not about that. It’s just not. So, amidst my lists of to-do’s and to-brings, one item remains the same: laugh it off, homegirl. Your loved ones are all around you, and these are the moments when life is so sweet.

I’m telling you this now because I never want to be disingenuous on this website (or, um, in life). I don’t want to masquerade my relationship or my wedding or myself as perfect. I’m not going to carefully select my re-cap pictures so you think that I didn’t have any fly-aways or that the photographer never caught a picture of me laughing so hard that I have a double chin. My hair gets frizzy sometimes, y’all, and I don’t worry about looking pretty when I laugh.

What about you? Anyone embracing imperfection? Planning for it, even?

(Also, when I completely revert to panic next week about how soon our wedding is, someone remind me that I wrote this post, okay?)