The Brides of Wedding Blogs, Part 2

This being a wide world, there are also bride blogs that I read for nothing but the pleasure of the familiar. Intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, no matter. And, as always when we rummage through the attics of our own people, wherever we find those people, however we decide that they are our people, we exclaim with recognition as we read. “Oh yes, look, I had that sparkly thing on my head! And look, how funny, she’s right, yes I thought that too! And yes of course you want black calla lilies or all white water lilies or wildflowers from a High Sierra meadow!” In my case, east side bride and her native coolness, Mother and Bride who wants to get married in cowboy boots, Cats, Cheese, and a Wedding Please!, where a woman who identifies as queer is marrying a man in New Orleans, eating amazing food, and fighting with her mother, I read them all without having any analytical filter. Just because I like them. And oddly enough, with none of them do I have the feeling of peering into an alien culture. But that’s just me and the cohort I have chosen for myself. With any luck, it will be an ever-widening cohort.

Cyberoptix Tie Lab via A Practical Wedding

Speaking of cohorts: “This is not a tie”. Yes. This is how High WASPs address weddings. Either they say, “This is a wedding, nothing more, nothing less. We will not discuss the implications.” Or they say, “This? This little thing? This isn’t a wedding. We just happen to be getting married. I promise.” The image above is from the bride blog that I think addresses weddings and the wedding industry from a clear space. A Practical Wedding. Meg’s premise is that weddings ought to be first and foremost the creation and the reflection of the people getting married. Well, yeah. But that simple premise can be difficult to realize. Why?

1. The minute that two people say to each other, “Maybe we will get married some day….,” someone somewhere senses the possibility of large sums of money. Planning a wedding can be like trying to take a romantic walk down a mountain path, only large billboards block the view on either side. Silicon Valley billboards too, the kinds that light up and blink, and change, and tell you the future is now.

2. Weddings create marriages. And marriages create families. And created families have meaning for the families of origin. And meaning creates opinions.
3. Weddings create parents. And parents create children, and children are our only real hope of thwarting death. In our hearts. If you remember, I find death to be a real problem. A lot of mythic weight, then.

Brides have to make their way through a dynamic industry where high voltage technology changes and branding fervor run rampant. Then they have their own culture and their own family emotions to navigate. Then they have the human myth of living forever telling itself in the background.

No wonder. But tulle is a lovely narcotic. And the enduring pursuit of an aesthetic is the same instinct that drives artists. It endures. So I love weddings. And I love wedding blogs. And I hope the little fish of personal hope at the heart of most weddings keeps everyone going while the industry clashes and trumpets above.