Blog Tide released their top 100 wedding blogs and I’m not on it. Bah. That list knows nothing.
Actually, I’m not surprised. I don’t advertise, I don’t comment much on other sites, and my trackbacks have been banned from a few sites (seems that criticism amongst brides is considered a no). A lot of the sites on that list are DIY oriented blogs which means….something. I’m not sure. In fact, I wonder a lot about what a DIY wedding means. Sure, it stands for Do It Yourself, but the current movement stems from the late punk movement that gradually spread amongst the gen xers, into the bourgeoisie upper middle class culture, and is now THE thing to do. It’s always masked as a way to bring your personality and “uniqueness” to a wedding. And by not going through a vendor, you’re “doing your own thing”, fighting your own faux rebellion against the wedding industry, and being special. I’m kinda of tired with this idea of “special”.
Maybe I have a strange perspective on DIY being an old punk and mexican but why is this DIY movement and weddings pretty much restricted to one social and ethnic class? And why is it really not any form of rebellion? Making your own dollies, having a friend perform your ceremony, and using fake flowers instead of real ones isn’t rebellion. And I don’t think of it as inducing your personality and uniqueness into a wedding either. Unless you’re going to Vegas and entering a cookie cutter wedding machine, there is no such thing as a cookie cutter wedding. They all have the same structure, they might have the same big pieces and layout, but there is always something that is different or the puzzle pieces are put into a different order to make it, when analyzed at the detail level, different from others. And if you look at the big picture, a wedding, no matter how it looks or its reception, all looks just like every other one. So why is DIY a movement and why is it claimed that the only way to make your wedding “personal” is by arts and crafts? Isn’t that defining weddings to fit a mold which is what the DIY wedding movement is trying to “fight against” anyways?
It’s weird but maybe it has to do with how weddings are pushed on young women from an early age. As a guy, I don’t suffer that very much growing up. Sure, I get misguided into believing the White Knight Syndrome (or lazy bum and slob syndrome) but, all in all, I have it easy in certain ways. All I’m suppose to do is define my self worth through how much money I make and what job I do which isn’t that hard. I’m not suppose to plan my wedding out to the very details. At least, not until the big day itself. So I could see DIY as being a slight rebellion against prevailing social pressures but for the child who dreamed up her wedding as a little girl and now, older and wiser, is spending her time making napkin holders out making her different than when she was 5 years old? Maybe it just feels different. And maybe that’s good enough.
Feeling different and being different are two separate things. The first is something that anyone can do and most people seem to strive for. They chase after the second thing – the actual being different. The problem is that actually being different is not defined by the individual. It is defined by those around you and by the society you live in. DIY weddings strike me as those who are striving to feel different when, in reality, they’re not. They’re pushing the social boundaries that they believe enclose them even though those social pressures might not be real but might merely be a projection of what they themselves participate in their everyday lives. The actually being different is a different animal and isn’t necessarily as positive as the DIY wedding brides seem to think it is. Not hiring a DJ doesn’t make you part of column b. Not spending $20,000 dollars on your wedding (even though the average wedding numbers are mostly screwed up anyways since they come from a small sample set of brides based in the upper middle class of NYC) does not make you different. And striving for this idea of “personal” and “unique” in your wedding makes you just like everyone one else. But you know what does make your wedding different? Not wearing a strapless dress. I am never going to stop saying that.