Hayleigh and Scott had several reasons for wanting to keep their September 13th 2020 wedding date; not only is 13 their lucky number, but earlier in the year Hayleigh had some finishing touches added to her sleeve and filled a small gap with the wedding date in roman numerals… a few weeks later the world shut down completely! “I had a bit of a mild panic at the thought of potentially having the wrong date tattooed for life but it would have been a funny story and the crisis was averted by managing to go ahead anyway.”
What’s that snarky and also 200% true saying about traditions? They’re just peer pressure from dead people. And if we stuck to all the things ‘we’ve always done’, there’d still be six-year-old coal miners who smoke pipes, chain smokers on airplanes and people tuning in to Two and a Half Men.
While we’re often more than happy, nay, gleeful to chuck out traditions that are way past their use by date, when it comes to weddings it’s a different story. Even the most modern human persons begin to fret over what calamity will happen if they see their betrothed prior to the wedding ceremony, whether their future children will be born with tails if they forget to include ‘something blue’ on their person, or if there’ll be a plague on their house if mum AND dad walk them down the aisle.
It’s time to piss off these weird, superstitious traditions that have no meaning for you and go to work on what does feel meaningful. Because hot tip: The best weddings are not the ones with the most expensive Champagne – though who doesn’t like a bit of fancy plonk? – they’re the ones that really feel like the couple in question. The best weddings are the ones created with considered decisions that reflect them, rather than stuffy traditions they’ve been peer pressured into by living and dead people mind you, often with quite awful backstories of misogyny and the patriarchy gone mad.
So, let’s chat about traditions that ought to get in the bin.
OK hear me out, while 2020 sucked in many, MANY ways, also, it was kind of amazing. We got to spend time at home, we started to appreciate the small things, we realised just how lucky we are to have the NHS and we got to revaluate what is really important to us, too. While having to postpone your wedding was obviously a massive suckfest, it did give you more excuses to buy more issues of Rock n Roll Bride magazine soooooo who can really be mad about that!?
You may have gone into wedding planning thinking it was all going to be about dresses and flowers and champagne breakfasts (believe me, it’s not, even if you don’t have a worldwide pandemic to contend with!) But I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all realised what the true meaning of weddings, and marriage, is over the past nine months.
Love. Commitment. Standing up in front of your loved ones (even if that is over Zoom!) and saying “YOU ARE THE ONE I CHOOSE; YOU ARE MY PERSON.”
That, my friend, is why you chose to get married in the first place, and that will never, ever change. Even if your wedding ended up looking a bit different to how you expected, or its going to happen a little bit later.
The world works in funny ways; a mutual friend showed Dóra a photo of his tattoo artist, Krisztián. A few days later, Dóra took a train to visit this friend, and Krisztián, who had never heard of Dóra before, spotted her at the ticket booth and decided to sit next to her on the train. “I immediately recognised him,” the bride told us, “as at the time he had a red beard, long hair and enough tattoos for a whole village.” A three-hour train journey later and they became firm friends. “What’s even more serendipitous about this story is that my mum and dad met on a train, too!”
We don’t feature styled shoots that often here at Rock n Roll Bride any more, far preferring the real details involved from your gorgeous wedding days, but when something this dreamy lands in our inbox, we can’t resist! Husband and wife team The Chamberlins have longed to shoot a celestial-themed set-up for a long time; Celle is obsessed with all things starry and both her and Will feel a deep spiritual connection to the heavens due to their faith. They told us; “we wanted to celebrate the beauty, the freedom and the vastness of the skies by arranging a celestial-themed styled shoot.”
Heidi and Louis met while in the cast of Romeo and Juliet with the Shakespeare Institute Players. Heidi was Romeo, Louis was Paris – she killed him nightly for the love of Juliet. A standard romance, then! A lot of people asked the couple if their wedding would be Midsummer Night’s Dream themed, but they just wanted to have colour, whimsy and a sense of play. Shakespeare just happened to show up a lot!
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