There is a menace out there in the wedding world, and its at every grocery store, every news stand and every pit stop you make. It taunts you with its glossy airbrushed brightly colored beauty, Its craft ideas and promises, it’s bold stylized letters that call out to you with “100 Ways to Cut Your Budget” or “50 Things Every Couple Must Absolutely Know”.
Yes, I’m talking about wedding magazines. Its pure unbridled wedding planning pornography, and we eat it up. Oh I know what you’re thinking, “What could possibly be so bad about some harmless wedding magazines?”. Well, unfortunately, there is a lot written between the lines on those pages.
When we began the preliminary stages of planning our wedding about a year ago, Joey I rushed out and bought a bundle of the latest wedding magazines. We flicked through the pages eyeballing the floral arrangements, the towering cakes, and the ever so chic couples featured in the spreads. It was fun! We talked about what we liked and what we wanted, what we absolutely hated and couldn’t even imagine. It was a perfect way to start our planning process because, like most couples, neither of us knew a thing about planning a wedding.
But as time went by and we developed our own ideas and personal tastes, a disturbing trend emerged in my wedding magazine reading. For, I would say, 80% of you, wedding magazines are going to eventually make you feel inferior about something. One of the first facts I read in a wedding magazine was that the average American wedding costs $28,000 and for “lucky” “brides” its more like $50,000+. I dunno about you readers, but my wedding budget isn’t even a third of the “average wedding”. And this is the chief problem; these magazines only cater to one niche audience, and they will tell you its average.
Specifically for you LGBT readers, this niche audience does not seem to include you. There is absolutely no gender neutral language in a wedding magazine. You will not find images of gay couples, you will not see representations of yourself. Martha Stewart Weddings did include a gay wedding its pages fairly recently which was definitely a step in the right direction but it was blip of sea of hetero wedding speak. This is something seemingly harmless but it can force yourself into “roles” you wouldn’t normally place on yourself. For example when I read a magazine and see the word Bride, I have to assume thats geared at me as I am at the forefront of most of our planning. But I’m not a bride… I’m a man, I hate the idea of being considered a bride.
While most magazines goals are to help couples, they often only highlight insecurities with their advice. For weeks I toiled over my invitation design, as one magazine told me that it was tacky to use anything store bought in an invite. I looked at hundreds of invitation designs and none of them felt right. Another wedding magazine said that one groom didn’t diet during his planning phase and hated every single picture of himself and refused to hang them up in his house, so suddenly I’m convinced a hardcore crash “wedding” diet will inevitably be the only way I love my photos. Or something simple I didn’t care about gets a Ms. Manners “The guests will expect it, so you should do it this way” and I worry that I’m doing my wedding planning “wrong”.
I eventually put a stop to this madness, when I read an advice column in which a reader asked if it was okay to have hosted wine and beer with a cash bar for other cocktails (the exact arrangement we are doing at our wedding). The magazine scolded her for asking her guests to pay for anything saying “You wouldn’t make them pay in your home, you shouldn’t at your wedding”. This time instead of questioning myself, I got annoyed. Who wrote these rules? Who gave them the authority? Why does any of this crap really matter, wasn’t this supposed to be about my relationship? I closed the magazine and swore to never read that publication again.
And it occurred to me how few pages of those magazines are really about marriage (and how many of them are about dresses, GOOD LORD). How little of it is actually about loving another person and wanting to grow old with them. The brief sections that are even about relationships are weird naggy pieces about “My Groom Doesn’t Care About The Planning” or “My Groom Hates Talking About The Wedding”. These kinds of publications all too often send all the wrong messages about what is important.
When it comes down to it there is so much good-intentioned pressure when you’re planning a wedding from family and friends to do something a certain way the last thing you need is another source telling what to do and not to do. Guests will never know if you bought your wedding invites from Target; you will be beautiful/handsome at your wedding whatever shape you are; the guests will be grateful for things out of their expectation zone. It will make your wedding that much more memorable. I’m not telling you to never go flip through a wedding magazine (though my humble opinion is that blogs offer much more variety in perspective), look at them and enjoy them, but don’t let anyone (or anything) let you loose sight of why you’re really there.
Hell yeah, Derek! You said it!! Alex and I looked at magazines for about a week (and to learn the names of dresses ‘shapes’ — but that was only for me). It helped brainstorm what goes into a wedding, but then magazine stuff didn’t factor into our wedding AT ALL. Blogs, definitely full of inspiration. Magazines, just not worth it…but you already said all this, and you said it so good!
Hear Hear! Well said. For me, wedding magazines were like peeking behind a curtain into some life I’ll never know or understand – one I have no interest in, thank you very much.
Great article Derek- the part about growing old together made me cry a little. : ) I hope you and your partner have a memorable wedding, with every moment spilling over with sincerity and love.
Great points! I read ‘em, but definitely with a huge grain of salt- laughing at or railing against the silly advice, but checking out the stuff that interests me.
Wedding magazines make me want to vomit. The pressure to be thin, spend lots of money, and have only open bars are the tip of the iceberg.
I read a post (on a blog I can’t remember right now) that took a mainstream wedding mag and counted the number of people of color from cover to cover. And while we’re aware of the fact that these wedding magazines reach out to mainly straight, white couples… to actually see the numbers against each other (white v. people of color) was a very real reminder that there is little to no equality or equity in the wedding industry.
When I see people reaching for The Knot or Martha on the magazine rack, I just want to dive in front and smack the magazine out of their hands so I can save them the energy they will waste trying to get skinny, trying to save $30,000, and trying to meet the standards of some jerk laughing it all the way to the bank.
Ok… I’m going to step down from my soap box now.
Thanks for this post, Derek. I think it’s always good to be reminded of why it’s important to have our weddings our way.
Oh, a thousand times this!
I did the same thing you did, ran out and bought up a bunch of magazines and came home and giggled over them…and then started to read, really read the content. You are absolutely right to point out that these only focus on how to have a wedding, not a marriage. And 85% of the magazine is ads for hideous poofy princess dresses & questionably sourced diamonds. It made me feel like crap about my small, kooky wedding for approximately five minutes, and then I got over it. Those magazines, wedding reality shows, and the Knot are for people who WANT the big white poofy princess wedding…and that is so not what I’m trying to acheive in my wedding planning. All I have to say is, thank god for supportive friends, family, and websites like Offbeat Bride!
And by the way, congrats on your engagement/wedding/marriage! :)
can i just say (from a vendor’s standpoint) that a lot of those articles are also geared towards SELLING trends just like the fashion mags do. it’s all about the bottom line. actually in some cases submissions are selected based on who you know and if you have ad space in the mag. life complications.
more on life complications… as a person i’m super open minded, as a photographer i’m emotion aware. i don’t care who my subject is or what their lifestyle is. i’m just looking for the moment. i would LOVE to shoot a gay wedding and feature it on my site despite all the warnings thrown my way by my peers. everyone is so worried about alienating a percentage of an audience but nobody asked me if i wanted to deal with that audience anyway. more life complications. it’s so much simpler if i just listen to me. looks like the same lesson you learned.
Good for you! I went through the same kind of anxiety during my wedding planning. Wedding mags and other purported experts only made me worry and feel bad about myself. Like you, I finally decided to put them all aside and just do things my own way, and I am so glad I did! Our wedding was two weeks ago, and I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. We got so many compliments on how original everything was and how personal it felt.
The best advice that I can give any bride or groom is that people will always try to tell you about the things you *have* to do. (You have to wear white; you have to have a DJ; you have to have an even bridal party; etc.) It’s all BS. You don’t have to do squat. Your wedding, like your marriage, is what you make it, so make it something you can look back on fondly.
Congrats on your wedding!!
Hopped over here from Offbeatbride.com, and I completely agree with your perspective. I am a queer identified woman marrying a queer identified man, and we both have queer family members and friends in attendance at the wedding (me being the daughter of a lesbian and him having a gay brother) and it’s been a real struggle finding vendors, websites, etc that use gender neutral terminology and don’t make it all hetero all the time. Yes, technically we have the privilege of abiding by those terms if we want, but I feel ill-at-ease, sort of like a part of my and my family are erased by those terms. Ugh.
Not to mention, those freaking magazines are super expensive in and of themselves! You get so much more variety, communication, content, and originality from blogs, and they don’t cost anything. I swore off any and all bridal magazines just after we got engaged. In order for those magazines to function, they have to sell themselves, which means that they must convince you that you need something (garters! tossing bouquets! 5 kinds of passed appetizers!), and then sell it to you at outrageous prices, all banking on the notion that you’ll fork it over because your wedding is a “once in a lifetime” deal. You don’t want it to suck because you didn’t spend enough, do you? Again – ugh. And cheers to you for forgoing that whole nightmare.
Yes. Yes. And yes.
And the absolute lack of gender neutral language
(even from blogs/posters I totally admire)
drives me freaking nuts!
Wedding mags, like pretty wedding blogs are nice to flip through and then let go of.
They do not set the rules.
There are no rules.
Thanks Derek! :)
Brilliantly said! You get 100 gold stars from me. I wish wedding industry folks would read and internalize this. Why, oh why, is it so revolutionary to be inclusive? Will brides really boycott wedding magazines if they use terms like “future spouse”?
Thank you thank you thank you for saying it out loud
I’ve been to SO many weddings for friends and family and I can tell you from a guest’s perspective that the ONLY thing that really counts is how sincere the whole thing is. My absolute favorite weddings have all had one thing in common: they are ALL about the celebration of these people’s love and lives together. You quickly forget what food/drink was served, what the decor was and sometimes even what the couple wore – but you always remember the happy buzz that comes from truly being able to share and participate in an important life event with people you care about.
DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED, AMIRIGHT?! But seriously, wedding magazines make me vomit every time I open one. It’s like I was just looking at pretty photography more than anything because I knew none of the things in the pages were anything I could ever have. I can’t even imagine how frustrating they must be to LGBT couples.
Frustration!!
Derek,
Your article was ver well stated! I completely agree that there has been almost no recognition of LBGT weddings and that it is truly time that magazines dropped the stereotypes and made the articles gender neutral.
Additionally, much more emphasis should be made on the relationship between two loving persons and not so much of the “Bling”.
Way to go!!!
AMEN! Said so very well. I wish I came to that realization earlier on in our planning… Why pay for guilt trips?