I am so happy to be guest posting on Charm City Wed today! When Serena invited me to guest post, I was thrilled to get to share some advice with CCW readers! So for today I decided to write about making your wedding your own – and how the heck you do that.

Photo Credit: Kristi Odom

This piece mostly grew from a recent email I received from one of my wedding coordination couples. They wrote me, struggling with how to pick a wedding theme or design that was “them.” They said:

“We are struggling with what people think of when they think of us. I love a lot of the [things we see on Pinterest] but don’t really know how to personalize it and make it “us.” We keep getting bogged down and stressed out because we can’t think of anything that is “us” and “perfect.”
I don’t know if that makes us dull and boring or just hard to peg.”

I could start by ranting about the pressure wedding blogs & Pinterest have put on couples to have a “blog-worthy” wedding. I have even heard couples APOLOGIZING to vendors that their wedding won’t be that way. However, I’ll leave my lengthy opinions on this topic for another day and instead I’ll offer the same advice that I gave to my couple.

Photo Credit: Stephen Gosling Photography

Bottom line: stop struggling and worrying what other people might think about your wedding, if it’s personalized enough, if it’s cool enough, or if it’s whatever enough. Instead, focus on what the two of you want and love and enjoy and that will form into the theme, the essence of your wedding.

Photo Credit: Leo Druker

I offered my clients an example. I mentioned how my husband and I used polka dots as a pattern in our wedding colors. We liked the pattern, but polka dots in no way define us. Instead, we loved the fun vibe polka dots added to our color palette and so we incorporated it into our wedding day. People saw the polka dots as fun and different and that was then attributed to us and our wedding – fun and different!

Photo Credit: Live It Out Photo

I told them, by doing the things you both like and love on your wedding day; the wedding will become “you”. There is no need to stress out over attempting to entirely personalize your wedding day. Do what you want, what you love, and that will be more than enough.

So, how do we do this, really? We start with a really simple exercise: make a list of things the two of you love to do or just like in everyday life.

Photo Credit: Leslie Maron Photography

Andy and I love DC – so we did DC neighborhoods for our table names. We also love mustaches & chucks, so we used those too! The wedding became an amalgamation of the things we love and was easily tied together by a consistent color scheme. We never thought to ourselves, “what do other people think we are like, or what do other people think our wedding will be like.” Instead, we did what we liked and what we enjoyed together and in the end all of our guests agreed that the wedding was indeed, 100% us.