Your Wedding Is Not Content For Social Media

Paul and Marquis at Billy Penn Studios, It had every unique detail that was their own. Photo Credit: Nick Raimondi

  Somewhere along the way, weddings became something to produce for an audience. When searching for vendors, you are asking for "documentary photographers", "nontraditional food", designs that are straight off of Pinterest or Instagram or TikTok, instead of "what is unique to us?". The perfect photographs, the perfect reel, the perfectly styled detail shot, the dramatic floral installation everyone will share, the moment designed to go viral.  And I think we've forgotten something.  You are supposed to be there.  Not simply physically present.  Actually there.  Laughing with your friends, eating the food you spent months choosing, dancing with your new spouse, looking across the room and seeing the people you love gathered in one place.  Having moments no photographer captures because they weren't created for a camera in the first place.

   I love beautiful weddings. I have spent more than twenty-three years helping create them.  Design matters to me, details matter to me.  Photography matters enormously because long after the day is over, those photographs become part of your family history.  But none of those things should matter more than the experience itself.  Your wedding isn't a photo shoot with a marriage attached to it.  It isn't content for your vendors.  It isn't a competition with the wedding you saw online last week.  And it certainly isn't a performance you have to give for everyone watching.  It's a celebration of two people beginning a marriage.  

   So when you're making decisions, I'd like you to occasionally put down the inspiration photographs and ask a different question…  How do we want this to feel?  Not, how do we want it to look?  How do we want it to feel?  Do you want dinner to feel like one enormous family table?  Do you want the dance floor packed all night?  Do you want quiet moments alone together?  Do you want your guests laughing over cocktails while music drifts through the room?  Do you want elegance without formality?  Tradition?  Surprise?  Absolute joyful chaos? Start there.  Then let the design support the experience instead of allowing the design to become the experience.  Because twenty years from now, you probably won't remember whether every detail was Instagram-worthy.  But you will remember looking across a crowded room and finding the person you had just married.  You will remember your father's face, your best friend's ridiculous toast, the song everyone screamed at the top of their lungs.  You will remember how it felt.

Create a wedding worth living—not merely one worth posting.

Paul and Marquis wanted a surprise for their guests and Elmo fit the bill perfectly!