The Two Bride Dilemma

Around Christmas time, my Maid of Honor had the realization that that there were two brides in our wedding.  Obviously she knew that Jesse and I were both ladies.  What she hadn't thought about was that we would both be Brides.  She exclaimed this realization as I described the dress Joy Teiken of Joy Noelle in Minneapolis was making for Jesse.  Basically, she said, "Are you afraid Jesse is going to look hotter than you?"  My best friend is like an old pair of pinking sheers at times: jagged and blunt.

I had thought about this numerous times though, albeit in a different way, about how to ensure that our looks were not competing with each other and that they each captured the essence of who we are.  Choosing to go with Joy to make our dresses complement and not compete with each other was the first step.  Joy just got it.  In my first conversation on the phone with her she was like, "Oh, yeah, I've done plenty of two brides' dresses where they should look like they belong together but aren't matchy-matchy."  Hired.

I told my MOH that all I thought about when I thought about Jesse all dolled up in her dress was how beautiful she was going to look and how if you are inviting everyone you care about, some of who have not met her, it's nice to think that her beauty is so great it poses concern!  Plus, a little healthy concern about your own beauty showing through on your wedding day is good motivation to look your best too.  Especially when the woman you are marrying is strikingly beautiful.

All of this said though, this morning I was looking through through Style Me Pretty's E-Glossy Magazine featuring the Best of 2010 Weddings and I got overwhelmed.  I went downstairs to unload on Jesse while she was writing (it didn't really matter if she was fully listening) about how many beautiful things I had just seen and how overwhelmed I was.  The SMP E-Glossy had a bride who was in a dress that looks a lot like mine, there was a lot of antique silver in the photos, and a lot of brides who chose to have their maids wear different shades and styles of dresses.  All of this was affirmation that the choices I am making are A) good ones, and B) not completely epiphanies.  By the latter I mean this: I look at so many blog images that even when I come up with an idea on my own--like to solely use antique silver as serving ware for our family-style meal, I probably saw it somewhere else.  Obvious, right?  Sometimes the obvious hits you like a ton of DIY, hand-made bricks when you are a creative person.  Inspiration is why I look at all these images in the first place but I want to be able to step outside the inspiration in order to create my own wedding and ideas for future weddings I will style and coordinate.  I had a similar issue in graduate school when I was pulling together lit reviews for my various research topics.  It's hard to have an idea that you want to explore and then to pull together what has already been done around that idea and then to have to fill in the gaps where others haven't explored.  It's the same way with innovation in weddings.

As I was processing all of this with Jesse I mentioned that one thing all of these weddings had in common on SMP were that the brides were Gorgeous.  As in Drop Dead.  The brides were slim and fresh-faced and model-esque.  This of course makes me want to be as beautiful as possible as we plan to use photos from our wedding not only as keepsakes for generations to come (no pressure there At All) but also to promote Juliane James Place and my event styling business, Sota Pop.  For the hour that I looked through these pictures in the e-glossy I lost my adult mind and switched into insecure, competitive teenager mode.  So out of control.

To further add to how out of control I am I then realized that because we have two brides that if we share our wedding publicly I might not be the bride who was featured!!!  I had never considered this because my thoughts about sharing our wedding publicly (outside of business promotion directed by me) went this far: I like seeing other people's weddings--it would be great if other people got to see how cool ours is going to be.  As I was talking this out with Jesse, who was barely listening most likely as a relationship-survival mechanism, I was joking that it would be hard to explain this moment to our photographer, Eliesa, that that was the reason Jesse wasn't allowed to be in any pictures alone.  Hahaha. 

Now, it's hard to write that without laughing so hard my eyes tear up, but it hits at the serious dilemma with two brides.  A bride wants to be the center of attention to some degree and the entire event is structured around that.  So many traditions are based on this bride-as-focal-point idea.  It's complicated when there are two brides.  Things like walking down the aisle become something that needs to be decided carefully so that both brides can share the spotlight.  Luckily for me I am marrying a woman who could care less about just about everything I detailed here so I'm sure that we will have everything worked out in time for the wedding--and by worked out I mean focused on both of us with and emphasis on me.  Now if only I could do something about how great she looks in photos...