My Pinterest Wedding Problems

Let me just start this out by saying that I love Pinterest. I love pinning and looking at photos and finding all sorts of things that inspire me. Pinterest is a force to be used for good to inspire and showcase the work and love of all people.

Now, I’m sure you’ve been into the Pinterest “Wedding” tag, or perhaps you haven’t. If you have, you know that it’s a place full of great ideas on how to plan your wedding, pictures of wedding dresses and, in general, a gathering of creative and innovative ideas for how to plan wedding.

What no one tells you when you create your wedding board (your mind is full of wonder and ideas) is that this can be a bad thing. When I set out to plan my wedding, I had a few shaky ideas in mind. It was cloudy, but I wanted the moon. I started searching Pinterest a lot.

Since then, I have at least 3 full-on meltdowns about my wedding choices. I’m not the meltdown type, but I am a perfectionist. After creating a Pinterest wedding board, I’d lay awake on many a night thinking that I’m ruining everything, that my wedding will be a disaster because I can’t find harmony in the details. I want people to look at my wedding pictures and think that I was able to create a perfect event that perfectly sums up the love that is happening. Let’s just be honest, I want to put my pictures up on Pinterest and have people pin them for ideas for their own weddings. I want the ‘oooh!’ and ‘aaaaaah!’ of knowing that I made the right (perfect) choices.

And this is where I’ve gone wrong. The weddings I’ve seen on Pinterest have all been beautiful. I’ve looked at them with adoration and envy. I’ve looked at decked-out ceremonies and boho brides, and I’ve wanted to do and be all of them. But the problem is, I haven’t coveted these weddings because they showcase the important part of the wedding (you know, love, commitment, the bride and the groom). I wanted them because they’re pretty. Because they’d make good pictures. Because whatever I’m looking at (from a flowery ceremony backdrop to flower crowns to ethereal wedding dresses that would never look good on my body) is the latest most-popular trend in the Pinterest “Wedding” tag. And I had become obsessed with the Pinterest “Wedding” tag.

Between fantasizing about flowers and color palettes, I lost focus on what is important at this major life event: I’m marrying the love of my life and all of my family and friends will be there to witness it. Things don’t have to be perfect. I don’t need to do every single DIY idea I see on Pinterest or hire a million-dollar photographer for my million-dollar venue (not that either of these things are bad, I just can’t feasibly afford them) to be happy.

After these meltdowns, I pulled myself together and got some perspective: I don’t need a Pinterest wedding to be happy. I need good food, family and friends, a dress to wear (which I have) and, most of all, the Groom. I need to finish the wedding playlist and hire a caterer to make sure that we have something to eat. It’s not about having the best photos and showing off the handmade decorations that I spent a summer creating. It’s about the union of myself to the coolest person I’ve met and the celebration that follows.

Amanda Hill has a BA in Creative Writing. She enjoys art that is included but not limited to: really rad tattoos, writing sad poetry and then deleting it, reading the labels of soda bottles, and singing badly in the shower.