I know that many brides feel a burnout from reading so many blogs and wedding magazines. I never had that problem. And I don’t think it’s because I have a superhuman strength that wards off the blog burnout. Really I just didn’t read that many of them. I don’t have a stack of wedding magazines in my apartment, I have three (maybe four? one of them might have gotten lost…). As for blogs, I have regularly checked three during our engagement: So You’re Engayged, Wedding Bee, and Off Beat Bride. For the first few months we were engaged work was really slow, and I found myself spending a lot of time on these sites browsing through various people’s posts. There were a couple of bloggers who’s posts I got hooked on, and I enjoyed following their stories. And I found great ideas for things that we had no clue what to do with.
Once all of the descisions had been made about what we were going to do and howwe are going to do it, I did something that is apparently unheard of in the weddingworld, I stopped reading blogs (except of course all of the wonderful posts on SYE). I don’t know how I managed to escape the pre-wedding-blog-burnout, but I have. So I’ll touch on one experience that isn’t quite the same, but did involve the Internet, my wedding, and a desire to smash my computer with a golf club.
When Jen and I got engaged, I ran (no walking, no casual stroll over to the good old computer, I ran) to TheKnot.comand signed us up. And you know what? Three weeks later, I hated it. There were articles after articles of how to have your perfect wedding for thrity grand (thirty grand? really? that’s what I supposed to spend on my wedding?!), and how to make everything yourself without it looking home made. Some people may think that hating the TheKnot.com is a little strong. I don’t*. It was giving me anxiety about a wedding that was still a year away! I didn’t want to even start planning the wedding because I was convinced that we could never have enough money, time or people. Ugh, I get tense just thinking about it. I wasn’t sleeping well, and all of the sudden I was having body image issues that I had never had before (Suddenly my hair was the wrong color and my skin was never going to be clear enough. Oh, and that five pounds you’ve gained since college? That makes you look all kinds of wrong) So yes, we walked away. When I talked about our Save The Dates I mentioned that we were going to use their website for the electronic STD. But we didn’t, instead we made our own and found a wedding/Internet balance that didn’t make me want to run into the Charles River in hopes that the Harvard Crew team would run me down.
* I do not mean to belittle the work of the fine people at TheKnot.com or the people who find their website helpful and full of great things. I can only speak to my own expierence.
I’ve found that the knot really gears itself towards one type of person, instead of being a great site for all. I know so many of my couples who have ended up on cakes or homemade banners while they went to look for a photographer or something else. It tends to be a site where you can end up so far away from where you started and then you give up and walk away.
I totally agree with your feelings about The Knot. Similarly, I ran there and signed up as well and shortly thereafter realized that I was not in the demographic they were trying to reach out to. I found it to be very heterocentric and even their “gay weddings” section or site left a lot to be desire.
I heard you about The Knot. I only went there once, when we were searching for wedding websites. Only to found out that at the time of filling up the form there was only one option for our names bride and groom, well there is no groom in this wedding and they were not open to the idea to change it.
With regards to Wedding Bee and its sister website Project Wedding both owned by eHarmony – a NON-LGBT friendly company. I got to experienced on my own some pretty hateful ladies there and a lot of discrimination. I am not generalizing as I know there are cool people there but what I got to experience was enough to take my business elsewhere, not worth it of my time.
Since then I joined Off Beat Bride and it is a cool place, I am not there that often but it is an open minded site with a relatively big LGBT group – compared to other sites.
eeeew. ungay wedding sites. gives me the hebbie-ba-geebies. i think we’ll make sure to stay away from those.
Thank you so much for your post. I too, ran to theknot after getting engaged, because that is what my friends were doing (3 of us got engaged in the same month). After all of the looking, two of us have stayed away. I have found that mywedding.com is a bit more inclusive (they have the option of “partner”) if you are looking to make a wedding websiteto stay a bit greener.
Always good to know that others are turned off by the big names out there.