Soapbox

In an effort to put-off doing what's expected of me, I went down memory lane. Yes, one year in the captains chair of Ole Lux n' U will create an alley of lovely moments, carefully captured and edited so that you don't see any of that icky stuff we like to pretend isn't there. 

These are some of my couples from this year and they're all lovely and whatnot and I really am excited and happy for them. I love Love. I love happy beginnings! I like to get to know them and hear about the people they have in their lives and things like that. I like to imagine what their lives will look like. Sometimes a couple seems so right for each other and sometimes you don't understand what brought a pair together or why one of them puts up with the other. Sometimes it's nearly jealousy inducing love and sometimes I wonder if I'll get a call to do flowers for the bride's second marriage in a few years - but that's a rather mean thought. 

I've done lots of big thinking on weddings and marriage in the last year. It's hard not to compare all of these relationships with each other and also the ones I see with the people in my life. If there was a quantifying chart of sorts that could lay things out for a couple, I wonder how many would look at the chart and still go through with it. Would anyone, if presented with an outline of the life they'll have with this person, say, "Yeah. That's good enough."? Because it's not going to be a perfect, flawless chart. You'd probably have hoped for more for yourself - looking at it all played out like that, even though choosing someone else would just be a different set of trials. It's more like choosing what annoying things you think you can tolerate. Marriage kind of seems like a romantic crapshoot. You don't really know what you're getting. You kind of know but you can't fully know because you haven't gotten through life yet. It's important to really like that person an awful lot.

The more weddings I decorate the less special each wedding feels. On the one hand, there's no having an original wedding anymore - everything has been done thousands of times over, except for garish things and those have no place at a wedding. On the other hand, that shouldn't matter. People seem to forget that a wedding is a celebration of the marriage, not an elaborate photoshoot for you at your fake best. I've become increasingly uninterested in lending a hand for a wedding that's lost it's morals along the way. Somehow I've also become slightly annoyed by weddings that only go through the motions instead of adding a little personality to it. People take this whole wedding show propaganda way too seriously. The wedding industry is a greedy monster that promotes all the wrong things and I'm often embarrassed to be a part of it. A wedding doesn't need music or flowers or specialty linens. That's all so far from the point. Have a little fun with it. What's with the somber music? And why are weddings and funerals the only times people give speeches about how great you are?

That soapbox said, some couples are very easy to believe in and I delight in their celebration (and find myself not charging them for things because I'm just too excited - don't tell Dad!) I feel I should say that I'm excited to get married someday. I believe in marriage. It's the big stressful show that I don't feel great about.