Unsolicited Advice for Brides to Be: Part Two

Back with the second half of my wedding reflections!

3. The Internet is your best friend and your worst enemy. 

Getting married in what I can only refer to as the "Pinterest Age" created a unique set of circumstances. Pinterest provides a wealth of resources and insurmountable challenges.

We'll start with the bad news:
The fact is you can only have one wedding. So each time you visit a blog that features a beach wedding, a farm wedding, a blue and yellow wedding, a Hindu/Jewish fusion wedding, an urban wedding, and so on, you fall in love with it and you have to kill the other wedding you were already planning in your head.

Brett and I imagined the following weddings:
-A wedding at Red Barn Farm in Kansas City
-A rooftop wedding at the Kansas City Public Library
-A wedding in a loft in Downtown Kansas City
-A wedding on the beach in Dauphin Island, Alabama
-A wedding at my grandparent's house

I also imagined decorations running the gamut from deep jewel-toned Moroccan flair to Dr. Seuss inspired bright colors and fantastically shaped centerpieces. The wedding we ended up with? One with a rustic, antique decor at my parent's farm. But the cascade of ideas didn't stop there! Hay bales for seating or chairs? Escort cards? Centerpieces? Altar?

A little inspiration is good. A lot is bad. Very bad. Your wedding won't look as good as the gorgeous ones you see featured on blog after blog. It will look better, I promise. It will turn out better than you ever imagined. That's the good news.

My advice regarding sites like Pinterest is to harness its energy in a controlled way. Limit your time just browsing for "inspo." Let your style and good taste guide you. From there, use Pinterest and wedding blogs as a tool. Want to make your own invitations? Search "DIY Invites" and focus your time on that project. Too cheap to use a florist? (Me too.) Pinterest helped me find a tutorial for coffee-filter flowers that was easy and saved me a ton of money.

My final piece of advice is the most important. If you forget the rest of it, please remember this:

4. Plan a marriage, have a wedding. 

Note how this is remarkably different than planning a wedding and having a marriage. Your marriage is not a by-product of your wedding. It's not a consequence. It's is the foundation, the gas, the lifeblood. A wedding isn't a party for you. It's not a party for your soon-to-be spouse. Or your parents, or families, or friends. It's a celebration of a lifetime commitment. If you spend the duration of your engagement focused on the wedding day without spending significant time considering what comes after, you're doing it wrong.

In past incarnations of my life I have been a lot of things: bossy, demanding, dramatic, bitchy. I wanted my wedding to be an opportunity to be the best version of myself- focused, considerate, gracious. I consider my family and friends to be my A-Team. These are the people on whom I know I can call when things are not always as magical as our wedding day. When Brett and I inevitably experience the valleys of life, it is on this support group that I know we can lean.

Because I expect so much from them (we had our wedding guests make a vow of commitment to us during our ceremony...) I wanted to give them the best of me as well. Put your relationship(s) front and center during this process. Be a kinder, more patient, more forgiving person. Do this for your spouse, your friends, your parents, and yourself.

It isn't about not being a "Bridezilla." It's about cultivating the blessings of deep, committed love. Dig into it. Invest in it. I already know how valuable the returns really are!