"Isn't she a vision of bridal beauty?"

(part one)

At this point of crisis, I could have opted out and decided that I would not attach so much symbolism to this dress. I would have continued with the sub-par design, and it would have been pretty enough.

But to do so would have been to completely ignore that the dress did have some significance to me; to have ignored the fear that comes with making an irrevocable, once-in-a-lifetime decision; and would have skipped the hard work of finding out what that significance was and I would have passed on finding out what “beautiful” really meant to me.

A wedding is a unique opportunity to expose your own preferences to the world and have them validated, recorded and remembered for the rest of your life (no pressure!). It’s safe to say that, consciously or not, I focused too much on the “validation” part of this process and neglected some of my own ideas, for fear of taking some kind of risk.

The perfectly serviceable A-line dress I designed wasn’t what I truly wanted to wear. It’s what thought I could wear.

With nothing to go on except pages and pages of magazine ads showing dresses I could not try on, and no public examples of anyone who looks like me wearing anything I’d want to wear, and fashion rules that say things like, “hide,” “elongate,” “slim,” and “disguise,” and external definitions of beauty (which may say anything from “you should wear an A-line” to “you’d be prettier if you were [fill in the blank]” to “women like you don’t get married”), I’d designed myself into a corner, and almost ended up stuck there.

I believe that a bride is at her most beautiful when she is at peace with herself and happy. Everything else will fall into place. I got the most peace from finding the courage to throw out all the “fashion rules” and quit worrying about what anyone (except me) thought of the dress. Ironically, it’s only then that I felt free enough to come up with something uniquely “me” and more beautiful.

From there, the process was easy. I think, however, that it's important to note that those "fashion rules" and external definitions, which are inescapable no matter how confident you are, were absolutely a factor in why I had trouble choosing a dress. The fact that I could not try on dresses and simply "find one" was also an enormous frustration. So while I ultimately did find my way to bridal-beauty happiness, it was a path considerably more fraught than it would have been had I been closer to a "mainstream" bride.

I know I'm not the only one who went through this. I've seen it many times on the boards as well, someone will say, "I'm getting the dress I love, no matter what anyone thinks, and that's final!" And invariably, they look beautiful and happiest in the dress that truly resonates with them.

How did you arrive at your vision of bridal beauty? Did you find your vision from an external cue, like advice from a friend or a magazine picture, or from some other place with yourself? Are you wearing something likely to elicit strong reactions from friends or family? How much do you care about what they think, anyway? And how fair is it that a bride's choices are routinely held up for scrutiny by others?

*The title is a quote from a wedding movie. Can you name it?