The Anti-Bride

By: Sarah Sibley (View Profile)

Let me tell you, ladies, it was the smartest thing we’ve done yet. Totally worth the money and piece of mind if you find the right planner. We also gave ourselves a year and a half until the big day. It seemed like a long time, but again, we know ourselves well enough to be realistic about the time it would take to plan, even with the help of a professional. Plus, we’ve never been stressed thinking we were running out of time.

It’s only five months now until the big day. Am I living in Bridezilla’s world of stress and regret? Not in the slightest. We started thinking of our wedding as the best party we’ll ever throw, and it became fun to plan. Because we’re not religious, a friend is marrying us. We kept the wedding small, with fifty people invited to attend. We’re having it at a destination, so it will be more like a holiday. We stopped looking for ideas in bridal magazines, and started going with our gut, even if it had never been done at a wedding before. We created a blog to inform our guests of our plans as they developed, and have posted FAQs and links to the destination of our wedding. We made a priorities list of what we were willing to spend money on. We let our personalities and shared interests guide us in every decision we’ve made, and we haven’t once compromised those principles.

So maybe I’m not the Anti-Bride, maybe I’ve create a new category: The Alterna-Bride.

Following are some Web sites to help you create the alterna-wedding that you’ve never dreamed of:

Wedding Paper Divas

blue skies & Daisies

Simply Modern Weddings

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posted: 08.24.2007
Marissa Feliciano
I was truly an anti-bride starting out...I dreaded everything about planning my wedding. But the closer it got, the more I got into it. It turned out to be the "Bestest Wedding Ever!" Literally, that's what we called it because we did not want to go the typical route for everything. Here's a visual summary of how it turned out: http://bestestweddingever.com/photos.htm
posted: 02.08.2007
Janece Moment
Another great resource for alterna-wedding planning is Ariel Meadow Stallings' book The Offbeat Bride. More info can be found at http://offbeatbride.com/.
posted: 02.08.2007
Lisa Meske
I, too, am an Anti-Bride, or even better, an Alterna-Bride! I couldn't deal with the commercialism and wanted my wedding to be outstandingly different. I bought my coture dress online for $75 at a going-out-of business sale, found cool coasters for the favors, creating a table theme (constellations as our first date was star-watching), wrote the ceremony, and included a hand-fasting ceremony and some fantastic poems. It's all about personalization while maintaining sanity!
posted: 02.05.2007
Sarah Pickerel
seriously, ladies. don't be afraid to be the first one to make your own wedding ritual. it's much more fun to do it YOUR WAY.
posted: 02.01.2007
Caroline Boussenot
Like you, I love my hubby-to-be, but the prospect of wedding planning isn't at the forefront on my mind. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and encouraging Alterna-Brides everywhere to throw out the magazines and follow their intuitions!
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