Why Your Outer Banks Wedding Will Be "Perfect"
An excerpt from my new book on Amazon, Wedding Planner, Guide Book and Organizer for the Bride of Today. (I used the pen name, Charity Silverstone. Better than some boring author name by a Reverend, right?!)
Wedding Planning Book on Tips, Secrets, and Ideas for the Wedding of Your Dreams
I’m sure you have been flipping through the pages of bridal magazines and scrolling through the profiles of wedding-inspired social media pages. As you flip and scroll through these pictures, you see these magical scenes of grooms twirling their brides in the sunset. You see a still frame of the groom, all teary-eyed as he read his vows. You see a bride walking down the aisle in a perfectly white wedding dress with not a hair out of place. Looking at this can make you long for this kind of perfect day, a day where everything runs the way it should, and it just seems like seamless movement from one moment to the next.
While this may be the perfect that you have dreamed of, it is probably not the perfect you want; you just don’t know it yet. Your wedding day will be perfect, but it will be perfect in ways that you do not expect.
Your Perfectly Imperfect Day
A lot of this book is going to focus on planning and preparing for your wedding. There are going to be a whole lot of practical tips and tricks that you will be able to use to organize your wedding day in the exact way you want it to be. This is why it is important to take this time to really define your perfect wedding. To get the right mindset in place and to really understand what a perfect wedding day will look like.
Every bride’s perfect wedding day is going to look different from the next. We all have different styles and preferences. It’s what makes us unique, and it is what makes weddings special. Imagine going to five weddings and having them all being exactly the same. That would be really boring, and you would not think that it was an accurate representation of the couple getting married. Something would just feel off. So then why would you want your wedding to be exactly like the cookie-cutter wedding you see on the packages of the magazines?
There is no doubt that they are all beautiful. No one can deny that the way they are presented is absolutely picturesque. This is what we often want our weddings to be like, even though this is not what is likely to happen. You’ve probably been to a number of weddings. Have they ever been like the photos? Sure, maybe moments of them have been—short moments when the camera clicks and freezes a beautiful posed moment. Let me ask you another question, is that what you remember the most from those weddings? I would hazard a guess and say no. The reason is that perfect is actually forgettable.
When everything is absolutely perfect and running the way it should be, it can be boring, and it is not realistic. When you think back to the weddings you have attended, you remember the part where the officiant said this funny thing about the couple. You remember when the flower girls decided to throw the flowers on the guests instead of on the ground. You remember when the bride dropped the ring just before putting it on the groom’s finger and made a joke about it. It’s these little moments that actually make up the perfect wedding. It’s the parts that you don’t plan but just happen, so you roll with it. These are the stories you will be telling. Nobody wants to tell a story about how everything flowed in lockstep with each other. What a boring story that would be. Memories are created by stories you want to tell, and that is never the airbrushed version of an event.
Now, focusing on your relationship with your fiance: it is probably imperfect but in the best way. There are probably mess-ups and silly moments. There are times when one of you has probably said something that you shouldn’t, and that ends up being an inside joke. Relationships are silly and fun, and unexpected. Things just happen, and when you let go and go along with it, you actually get to enjoy the moments presented to you.
All the mishaps, mistakes, and unexpected situations probably are what make you love each other more. That is how it’s going to be on your wedding day. You will plan and prepare as much as you can. You will make sure that everything is there and ready to go. The programs will be set, everyone will be dressed to near perfection, and suddenly something happens that you did not expect. These are the moments where you get to choose whether you are going to allow your day to be perfect in it’s own way or if you are going to try and force it into being something that it simply is not.
The truth is that all the pretty pictures that you see in magazines and will take on your own wedding day do not tell the whole story. The whole story cannot be captured in a few posed still frames; it has to be experienced in the little moments. It’s the moments when you snag your dress and your aunt busts out her emergency sewing kit to fix the tear. It’s when you and your new husband sneak away from the crowd to get a moment to take in the fact that you are really married. It’s the moment when your uncle has one drink too many and breaks out onto the dance floor to do his best Micheal Jackson moves. There is nothing better than those moments. It’s the moments that make you laugh, make you feel loved, and the ones that leave you so thankful for what you have. This is perfection.
Perfection should not be defined by what you plan but by all the moments that you don’t plan. Perfection is built in the moments even before the wedding when you and your bridal party are sitting up till midnight preparing the wedding favors while you chat about life. It’s built in the moments when you and your fiance go for dance lessons and end up just doing your own thing. It’s in the moments when you take your mom with you to see the dress you will be wearing when you walk down the aisle. Don’t all these moments sound so much better than the cookie-cutter moments we are all taught are perfect?
So will your wedding be perfect? The answer is both yes and no. It will be a perfect day filled with imperfections that will all culminate into one of the best experiences of your life. If you think that the perfect venue or the perfect centerpieces will make the perfect day, it won’t. But all of these things will be perfect because it is all part of your perfect day. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get everything right. You can plan and prepare to the best of your ability but there will be things that you could never account for. Thank goodness for those moments and those unexpected surprises; they are what will make your dream wedding.
