Posts Tagged ‘engagement photos’

When you’re planning a wedding there are a million decisions, some of them small, some of them huge, and some that really matter. When we signed a contract with our photographer the big debating point was whether or not we were going to do an engagement session. I was all for it from the get go, Jen was a little more cautious. It was more money and we were on a tight budget. After we talked through it for a couple of days we decided that it was worth it. And boy were we right. So now brace yourself for a parade of (what I think are) pretty pictures.

Deciding on a location for our engagement session was the easy part.  We spend a lot of our time in Davis Square, and there is a bike path that runs through Davis. Using a location that was a part of our life was important. We wanted the pictures to be natural, to really represent us. We didn’t want to look at them and not recognize the people that were there. So we met up with our photographer, Leah, at the subway stop and started walking down the bike path and through the square.

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She's my rock!

Like everything else with this wedding, I decided to be very nontraditional with my engagement pics. I hired a photographer form New York who I’d worked with before to shoot them when she was here on a photo tour of SF last year. My photographer’s name is Sophie and she own a thriving photography studio called Shameless Photography. I first met Sophie in community a few years ago and when she opened up her studio I knew that I had to do a shoot with her – here’s one of our pics from the first shoot.

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We had no proposal. No engagement. No one person ever asked the other to marry them. Instead, we had several conversations about what we wanted from our relationship, how marriage fit into that picture, and how we wanted to make our future happen.

This photo is a LIE! We weren't engaged... and never have been!*

I like that it happened that way. It’s much more in keeping with our “relationship personality”. This doesn’t mean we aren’t romantic – we’re pretty sappy, mushy, overly romantic types who believe our falling in love is like every love song come true. But this is one of those things that I think snuck up on us pretty early in our relationship and it needed to be a mutual decision come to through good communication.

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In my last post about our engagement photos, I was still struggling to find an outfit that I loved, but wouldn’t come across as too definitive in our relationship roles. Bridesmate Beth was concerned that wearing a fancy vest and pants could be a little ‘butch’, which was a frustrating but accurate thought. What really constitutes a butch lesbian anyway? Well, I was unsure of the exact definition, so I looked it up.

According to the highly regarded, but academically unsound UrbanDictionary.com, a butch lesbian is defined as an overtly/stereotypically masculine or masculine-acting womanCan be used to denote an individual, or the dominant role in a lesbian relationship. Huh. Then, my little internet definition adventure took me into sub-categories: Stone Butch, Sport Dyke, Soft Butch, Chapstick Lesbian, Fellagirly, Gym Queen, Tomboy Femme, Futch and the list goes on and on!  I’m all for defining oneself, but on any given day, I could fit into any of these labels and more! If the labels were sewn into jeans, I could even be a Blue Jean Femme.

Why are we, as a community, so quick to jump to assumptions about others gender identities and relationship roles? And why are we so adamant on sticking to the traditional hetero-normative definition of what a couple should be? (Excuse that last sentence, I sort of threw up in my mouth as I typed it, but it is still true– vomit inducing or no.) I’ll be the first to admit that if I saw a photo of a lady in a dress and her partner (who happens to be…um….. ‘cherubic’ in weight) in pants, I too would make a quick decision on their relationship roles (aka who was butch or femme).  But what if you saw that cherubic gal in a skirt and her lady in workout clothes, showing off her super-toned arms? Who is the ‘butch’ now?  Because on any given day, that is little ol’ me and my bicep crushing Deborah.

Deborah and I in the summer of '08 at The 'Shoe on Ohio State University's campus in some of our typical outfits. Photo by Bridesmate Ashlea

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