Ariel Meadow Stallings - Offbeat Bride: Create a Wedding Thats Authentically YOU

W HEN I SAT DOWN TO WRITE O FFBEAT B RIDE IN 2005, IT WAS A DIFFERENT era. It was the time of Friendster and Myspace. A time when having a website for your wedding was still a new and nerdy ideaI mean, you had to hand-code it! It was a time when marriage equality still felt like a distant, rainbow-striped dream in the hearts of progressive Americans. A time before most of us knew the word cisgender. It was a time when many of you reading this may have been teenagers!

Needless to say, a LOT has changed since Offbeat Brides first edition. For me, the little website I launched to promote my book tour ended up becoming a global wedding planning resource thats been used by 50 million people over the past twelve years. Offbeatbride.com went on to spawn several other web publications, and in my attempt to sell a few copies of a book, I accidentally founded a media company thats kept me busy for almost fifteen years. Oops?

Technology has advanced in ways that, even as a nerd back in the mid-2000s, I never could have imagined. Back then, you felt high tech if your wedding favors were a CD-ROM of wedding songs that youd downloaded from a questionable online source. (Aww, cute!) Now, we all deal with ubiquitous smartphone use, wedding hashtags, app push notification overwhelm, and navigating social media etiquette faux pas. (And here I thought I was fancy for asking my wedding guests to upload their wedding photos to Flickr)

More joyfully, marriage equality is now legal across the United Statesand in Canada, Australia, and the UK, too! Offbeat Brides of all orientations and identities can now marry their beloveds all over the world. Yes, we still have a ways to go, but the political and legal progress of marriage equality in the past decade has been monumental.

One remarkable wedding industry shift is that, well, we kinda won the war against wedding homogeneity. Now its not only accepted that your wedding will reflect your personality, its almost assumed that of course youre going to have some references to your favorite bits of pop culture, or the place where you had your first date, or that song your dad used to sing to you.

For the most part, these days people understand that having an offbeat and authentic wedding is an optioneven the more conservative folks who think Offbeat Bride is tasteless and tacky. Alternative weddings have permeated American culture so deeply that even the most mainstream wedding media covers nontraditional wedding trends and nonwhite wedding dresses barely raise your moms eyebrow.

So, does that mean Offbeat Brides work is done? Is that it? Time to just fold it all up, and call it quits? Mission completed, see yall later?

Thats cute, but there is still so much to be done. Stuff like helping wedding vendors understand that gender essentialism isnt effective marketing. Stuff like ensuring that couples who feel underrepresented in wedding media can still feel supported in their planning processthis means representing couples with disabilities, couples who arent slender or young or white. Hell, this means representing folks who are more than a coupleOffbeat Bride has a long history of celebrating polyamorous commitment ceremonies, too.

I love that in the time that Offbeat Bride has been around, marriage equality has become accepted to the degree that sometimes people are like, Pshaw: Whats offbeat about this lesbian wedding?! Although Im personally giddy that lesbian weddings can now be considered boring (equality means we all get to be as boring as we want!), Im still wondering when gender-neutral contracts will become the standard for wedding vendors. Im still grumpy about the sign-up pages on mainstream wedding websites having fields for [Brides Name] and [Grooms Name], instead of just having [My Name] and [Partners Name].

But theres no denying that, at least when it comes to aesthetics, being an Offbeat Bride may not be as much of a battle as it used to be. I wrote this book with a sense of reactionary urgency and rebelliousnessI wasnt just being myself, I was also pushing hard against mainstream weddings, trying to carve out something different! I was defying the expectations! I was standing up for my own vision!

Truth be told, I definitely used my uniqueness as a defense mechanism, coupled with a healthy dose of offbeater-than-thou posturing. I mean, when this book was first released, I made promotional shirts that said, Offbeat Bride: Fuck Taffeta. I quickly learned that some offbeat people love taffeta and thats awesome! I am sorry for my old taffeta-shaming ways.

In updating this book for its third edition, taffeta-shaming and dismissiveness toward more traditional-looking weddings wasnt the only old stuff that had to change. Back in the mid-2000s, most of us didnt have the language to talk about gender and identity in the same way we do now. Back then, I made jokes that make me cringe now. (You want some humble pie? Spend some time with your work from fourteen years ago. Ouch. What an education.)

Back in the mid-2000s, I interviewed fifty-plus lab rats to include their stories in the book, and, for this edition, I added the thoughts of dozens more Offbeat Bride readers. I wanted to share more perspectives on things like planning a wedding while working with disabilities, nonbinary identities, and the challenges of modern technology. Youll see these Offbeat readers quoted and referenced throughout the bookIm choosing to identify readers only by their first names. Ive learned better than to identify anyone by their full name when talking about the challenges of wedding planning. Ive seen enough blog comments from angry family members who stumbled across something written about them on offbeatbride.com. Now I know better than to go offending family members.

These days, Offbeat Bride doesnt have to try so hard to offend anyone or be off-anythingits about being inclusive, a place where bride is a state of mind, not a set of genitals ( because you better believe there are masculine-identified brides!).