Wedding trend overthinking: Everyone else is doing it!

Guest post by silvergirl
Book Centerpieces open page
Photo by Crystal Liepa

I'm the girl who went into wedding planning with zero idea of what she wanted. I have heard of girls with binders full of ideas, carefully saved and cultivated while they search for a groom. As for me, I'm just looking forward to waking up the day after and being Mike's wife, but between now and then, we're having this wedding thing.

We really wanted something on the smaller side, close friends and family only. We wanted good food, good music, and good beer. We love things that are old and homey. We love our animals and we love books. Our love of books is probably one of our biggest “in commons” and one of the first big connections that we made.

I started searching online and found all these great ideas: mercury glass candle holders, books for centerpieces, lanterns, library card escort cards — and ran with it. I was so happy that we were doing things that felt like us and not just the same old cookie-cutter wedding stuff that we had seen throughout our twenties. It felt amazing.

Until we realized that everyone else was doing it, too. These cool ideas were just wedding trends.

Now, I see hundreds of weddings on Style Me Pretty and Offbeat Wed that look, well, like mine will, right down to having our friend officiate and walking down the aisle to an indie song.

And I started to feel like I was actually exactly on-trend, un-original, and that I had secretly ripped off someone else's wedding. And I started to worry that I wasn't being authentic. I was just doing stuff I liked, wasn't I?

But mostly, I was worried people would notice. I was worried that our friends would see our wedding and shake their heads at our vintage chic, super trendy wedding. That they would gag at yet another craft paper invitation, sigh at another centerpiece made of old books, lanterns, and mercury glass candle holders, and shake their heads at our photo booth mustaches.

And then I saved myself.

Here's the thing… who cares? Honestly, I bought all kinds of stuff that I loved. And I really loved it. I had options. I could have purchased anything. I picked the ones that felt right, that made me smile, that made me excited to put together a centerpiece, and I am going to own the shit out of all of it. Because we picked it all out, and we love it.

And I'm the girl who doesn't care what other people think, right? So why do I care if they think I'm boring? I don't need to be original for the sake of it. I only need to be me. And even if there are hundreds of weddings like mine this year… how many are our friends going to go to. Two? Three?

So, in their lifetime, they'll probably go to two weddings out of hundreds that look like mine. Those are pretty good odds and I can live with it.

I will own my wedding and love my wedding, right down to the kraft paper table numbers and programs that look like actual books. At the end of the day, I still get to go home with my partner. And that's all that matters.


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