This blog has been a guilty pleasure for the better part of a year now. I love blogging about weddings. In general, I don't consider myself especially artistically inclined, yet I regularly seek out creative opportunities and love beauty, especially when it's imbued with meaning. Blogging about weddings everyday lets me get my design-appreciating creative juices flowing, and joyously places me in the midst (at least in my mind) of the craft/design world. I also love to write Though I've struggled with insecurities about my writing skills and style for the better part of my life–academia will do that to you. Writing for the blog everyday is helping me heal from nearly a lifetime of writing insecurities.
Image from Summer Pierre
Still, it was not surprising when I mentioned my blogging life to a long-time and dear friend she responded with somewhat uncomfortable silence, which was followed by a late-night voice mail encouraging me to stop. "It's not you," she claimed. Well, in part that may be true. I am sometimes conflicted about being a wedding blogger. On the one hand, I love looking at all of the creativity and beautiful design that goes into modern weddings. And, as I said, I also love to write. On the other hand, I was never that girl dreaming of the day she would finally marry. Weddings weren't even on my radar until two full months after the Hindsight Groom proposed.
Like many self-proclaimed feminists who graduated from a particular women's college in the SF Bay Area, I primarily saw weddings as selfish, wasteful vanity fairs for vapid women who have no place better to direct their energies than in landing a man and ushering in a modern and conservative anti-feminist backlash. Oh dear, now that's harsh!
Image from the Pansy Princess
Perhaps it's needless to say that my view of weddings is much more complex. Yes, I am still concerned about the wastefulness of weddings; yes, some brides and vendors still scare me with values that I find a bit too conventional and conservative; and yes, I'll acquiesce, some weddings really are selfish vanity fairs that pedantically glorify a single, heterosexual model of marriage. But I also find the wedding industry in general is full of amazing creativity and thoughtfulness; full of strong and smart female business-owners; and full of couples that are striving to make their weddings and their marriages sacred and meaningful.
So when I saw this video posted over on Project Wedding my heart warmed and my ideas felt validated. There is goodness in the wedding industry. Goodness that is unselfish and and fixed outward rather than inward. Check it out: Paper Antler is on a mission shoot 50 weddings in 50 states over the course of 50 weeks to raise $50,000 to help stop human trafficking. How fantastic is that!?