Vision

Yesterday I let myself skive off revising for a test I have coming up by composing a wedding mood board. I got really excited sharing it with Arth over skype because we had such a clear vision of how we were going to make this day true to us that it felt like we were there already. Getting a vision of marrying in my head that really makes me happy has been something of a battle for me, so arriving at this point has made me want to write about how I got here. I say ‘I’ because I think I have been the crazy one in this process, the one who got lost in the middle, and now Arth and I are back together in sane wedding planning land I want to dissect my craziness.

I think it’s important to explain at this stage, mostly so I don’t come across as entirely crazy, that our engagement is looong. I got the opportunity to go and study in New Zealand for a year which pretty much removed the possibility of getting married in either of the first two summers after we got engaged. We knew we wanted to get married in the summer so we could be outside, so we’ve ended up with what will be a two and a half year engagement. Not so long in the grand scheme of things but it seems like a long time when you really want to get married RIGHT NOW!

Despite the fact that when we got engaged it was more than two years until the date we’d decided on part of me wanted to start planning this wedding from day one. Actually, more accurately, about 3 months before we officially got engaged which was when I think we’d decided that this was IT. Now I am not a weddingy person. I have said surprisingly recently that marriage is just a piece of paper, I have never planned my dream wedding in my head, I was always the groom when my sister and I dressed up to play weddings. This meant it came as something of a shock to me that not only did I want to get married, but I was actually thinking about dresses and flowers and colours, things I’d have previously scoffed at. The first few months I definitely got sucked in by the wedding industry, I was trying to keep true to myself but this was expressed in a very stilted manner. I was imagining bridesmaids in different shades of the same colour (gasp), a tea length wedding dress instead of a gown (god forbid), you get the picture. I was knocked completely off kilter by the plethora of people out there trying to sell you what a wedding ‘should be’ . While I had entered into the commitment to marry with a very untraditional vision of what our marriage will be, I was suddenly entertaining a surprisingly traditional view of how we would marry. What I didn’t manage in those first few months was to really think about this day reflecting what marrying meant to us, to consider how I felt about marrying as the guiding force behind my imaginings rather than a pretty picture that somebody somewhere was trying to sell.

Cue the blogosphere. Reading blogs written by sane people really helped bring me back down to earth (as I’ve mentioned), and that, combined with Arthur being much more level headed than me, has allowed me to find sane wedding planning mode. You know, the one where you focus on actually getting married and you remember you’ve never cared about shoes/salt and pepper shakers that would make cute cake toppers/what colour clothes your friends wear/whatever else you’re obsessing over this much before, so why now? I suppose it makes no sense to end a post with a moodboard in it, something that is very visual and superficial (and actually includes afore mentioned cake toppers), saying I’m in sane wedding planning mode. I’m looking at the moodboard as a way of explaining our vision to interested parties, I think it captures what we want from the day and hopefully it will help people to ‘get it’. Getting the images organised has let me get an overall feel for my ideas without focusing on particular details that we MUST have. Who knows, but it makes me smile.