Why am I chagrined?

Why do I call this blog The Chagrined Bride? Well duh! It's because I'm chagrined about being a bride! :-D

Although I BMX biked with the best of them when I was younger, I'm still very much a bit of a girly-girl. I'd probably be more of one if it didn't take so much time. I'm also a feminist who's very proud to call herself one. I love wearing cute clothes but not so much shopping for them. I'm 35 with an insane number of cats. My FH and I have lived together for almost ten years and we own a business together. I'm from a part of the country that usually gets banjo jokes made about it. I'm not really the target audience for most of the wedding industry.

I think the wedding industry has gotten a bit ridiculous. We're subjected to all of these perfect, expensive weddings that are planned by professionals and we're supposed to figure out a way to do a champagne wedding on a beer budget. Botox is required and you might want to think about getting those boobs lifted while you're at it. Don't even think about skimping on the flowers or everyone will know how cheap you really are!

So obviously, I think the current obsession with weddings is a bit silly. I mean, how many damn TV shows can they have about every freakin' aspect of weddings?!! At the same time, I also get very pissed about the idea that there's all these Bridezillas running around, spreading their bitch-i-tude wherever they go. It's a very sexist name first off. It panders to the idea that while an angry man can be admired, an angry woman should be scorned. It's also a way to be dismissive of a woman with a legitimate complaint. It also hypocritical. The same wedding industry that has set these unreal expectations about how perfect your wedding should be has no problem producing TV shows that make fun of woman when the pressure gets to them.

I've found over the past few months that it's hard to find a happy medium. You either must be obsessively planning every last detail down to the monogrammed toilet paper or you must treat the whole wedding process with scorn and make fun of any woman who enjoys it or spends too much money on it. Thank God for the blogsphere! Wedding blogs seem to be the one of the few places where you can find a compromise. You're able to find women who know that the getting married part is actually the most important part but that doesn't mean you can't have fun and take time planning the rest.

I'm very proud that I'm going to be a bride and a wife. At the same time, I'm a bit chagrined at how I've gotten into my wedding planning. I haven't lost site of the important part - that I'm marrying the man that I love. But I also love window shopping at Etsy for the perfect wedding jewelry. I haven't planned my wedding since I was 12. In fact, I hadn't really had any thoughts about exactly what I would like even though I knew The Boy was planning on proposing soon. I'm having a blast planning it now though!