So You're EnGAYged, a LGBT wedding blog

This month we are asked to write about wedding blogs.  Are we overwhelmed with the amount of them?  How many do we look at?  Are most geared toward opposite sex marriage?

My first response to the topic was, I don’t read wedding blogs, that was until I came across  So You’ re EnGAYged.   Actually, I did not go anywhere online when we first started planning, I just asked my bothers, their wives, my mom, and friends about planning etc.  One, because I like to ask A LOT of questions, which you can’t do on a static web-page and two, because I am lazy.

Upon reflecting about this, I wonder if I was hesitant to go out and look at wedding blogs because I assumed them to not be for me. For two men, not much can be gleaned from conversation about vales, wedding bouquets, dresses, etc., which a lot of these blogs talk about.  Which I think is the larger point that became clear when we first started venue searches: weddings and  wedding planning is feminine .  Everything was “bridal …” from package to suite to “for the bride” fast facts.  While I frankly don’t spend too much time worrying about what end of the femme/butch scale I fall on, I had a hard time with the idea of being labeled femme because I was planning a wedding.  And at times I was more offended by that then that fact that many places were geared toward hetrosexual couples.

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I love everything in this wedding collage from SixteenEighteen’s Photostream … but is it really right for me?

I was never much of a blog reader until I started planning a wedding. Before, I’d occasionally stumble upon a cute crafty tutorial or funny story, and find myself getting lost in someone else’s blog world, but it didn’t last long. By the next day, I would have forgotten the name of the blog and probably could not have found it again if I had to. The only non-wedding blog that I have ever visited regularly is Cake Wrecks. Nothing breaks up a boring work day like terribly designed pastries, I’ll tell you that.

Then one day I was hunting around on the internet for a suit that Rose would feel comfortable wearing for our wedding. I started wondering if we really were the only lesbian couple to have struggled with this dilemma. A google search of “butch wedding attire” brought me to the one and only So You’re Engayged! I was instantly hooked. I had never found a blog that was so relatable. And thus began my journey to find other similar blogs…

Now I reguarly peruse Offbeat Bride, Wedding Bee, Ruffled and A Practical Wedding. I’m still not a blog reading addict by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy looking through my favorites every once in a while. And do you know what I have come to discover? There are WAY too many good ideas out there. All these gorgeous blogs give me inspiration overload! No wonder I couldn’t pick a theme! There are just too many to choose from. Black and white Old Hollywood Glam? Yes please. Playful floral garden party? I’ll take a little of that. Modern nerdy color overload? Why not! I’ve almost had to stop myself from looking at these blogs too often because I end up adding more things to my already full list of elements that just have to be a part of our wedding. I just love it all! (more…)

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.

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