when wedding blogging gets ugly...

Many of you know that I started this blog when I fell in love with all things wedding as a bridesmaid for one of my best friends.  I started visiting various wedding blogs, telling myself I was helping my friend find ideas, but let's be honest, secretly planning my dream wedding to Mr. Q the whole time.  One of the first wedding blogs that I visited on a regular basis was Weddingbee.  For a long time, I assumed that when I got engaged, I would apply to be a Bee blogger.

When I did get engaged, I started meticulously blogging about every little aspect of our wedding planning... and found that I no longer felt the need to apply.  Having my own space was fine, even if my readership was minuscule.  I would have updated just as often and in just as much detail with zero followers - because I realized that I was blogging so that I could remember everything that went into creating our wedding.  I thought potentially being able to inspire and help other brides the way the blogs I read helped me would be a nice side effect.

Some of my friends have gotten a little more serious with their wedding blogs, and recently two of my blogger friends - one a newlywed, one a bride-to-be - became Bees!  I was so proud and happy for them, but I've stopped reading the 'bee as often (since I'm no longer planning my own wedding, I'm looking for out-of-the-box creative ideas to share with y'all rather than advice) and continued to read my friends' blogs by going straight to their homepages.  Recently I found that I could not access one of my friends' sites - her blog was locked.  What the what?

I went to Weddingbee's board to investigate.  It turned out that my friend had stepped down from Weddingbee because blogging was taking her focus off of the truly important things in her life: her relationships an her studies.  I suppose wedding blogging becomes a bit of a false idol for many of us.  However, I also learned an ugly truth through the boards:  commenters had left ugly, hurtful comments on my friend's post about the bridesmaids' dresses for her fairytale themed wedding.  My friend is one of the sweetest bloggers I know, and has only ever had kind things to say on my blog.  Her posts have been full of excitement, enthusiasm and originality.  And these comments must have crushed a little bit of that.

Planning a wedding can be awesome, y'all.  It's an opportunity for you and your partner to infuse your personalities into something fun and special and beautiful and share that with your beloved family members and closest friends - people who know who you are and what you love.  That's where the Internet gets tricky - because when you share your wedding details on the Internet, you're sharing them with people who don't know you, don't know what you love, and don't love you (yet).  And apparently some people have forgotten the old aphorism, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.  Most sensible people are completely capable of realizing they don't like something and moving on until they find something they do.

I've been reading wedding blogs since college, and I've seen plenty of ideas I wouldn't have chosen for my own wedding.  And on the flip side, there are plenty of brides out there who wouldn't dream of matching their bridesmaids' dresses and groomsmen's vests, serving ham biscuits for dinner, or decorating with other people's old stuff from Goodwill - but for Mr. Q and I, those choices fit, and our friends and family knew they were "us."  My friend's wedding guests will no doubt feel the same way - they will grin when they see those fairytale princesses following their queen down the aisle.