It is one thing to wince at the glow of a Real Wedding staring back at you from a blog, to scroll through—one eye closed, the other wide open—the documentation of a Real Day That Really Happened for One Real Couple. In most cases, behind the curtains of hanging moss and curls of calligraphy, you can almost see glints of the Real Love that made this whole $96,000 barn dance “necessary,” and at least that makes it bearable. Kind of.
Between clicks, you try to let those loving looks between bride and groom, captured by a high-price photographer, mollify the deep, dark hate brewing in you: Click, an entire suitcase of peonies, but I’m sure the bride’s father is a cardiologist, oh well. Click, a diamond the size of my ear, but perhaps it’s been in the family a long, long time, since it was just a ball of dust, can’t be mad at that. Click, oh my, a five-day affair in and around an ancient Italian castello. There has to be some rational excuse behind that, I won’t let it get to me.
But wedged into the HTML patchwork of every wedding blog is a much more sinister form of content: fake, synthetic weddings, imaginary affairs pieced together using an intricate system of ropes, sandbags and pulleys, filtered through Valencia and colonized by just one, maybe two, maybe no, living souls. Spend just a few moments on any of the big bad blogs and you’ll see these cloaked imposters within a few flicks of your scroll fingers: They are brides, but not just any bride. A special kind, one who is porcelain-stiff with dead eyes. Alone and unsparkling without the familiar light that follows real brides when they’re surrounded by friends, family, and of course, husbands. This strange bride might be perched at a desk in tall grass, writing a letter in white calligraphy to her fictional betrothed, or maybe standing in a boat whose parched old bow is overrun with fanciful blooms grown unchecked from a garden in a universe that isn’t ours.
These are the lonely brides of the “Inspiration Shoots,” a ridiculous product of a wedding industry that is full of more crap—I mean, inspiration—than it is actual weddings. Inspiration Shoots happen when wedding professionals like photographers, florists and event designers come together to create and photograph the Most Perfect Fake Wedding They Can Think Of. It is an endeavor of pure vision, a dream wedding without the pesky old tastes of actual brides and grooms getting in a designer’s way.
I get it: You’re creative, but serving clients can be suffocating, so every now and then it’s great to get together with all your industry pals in Downtown Denver, call up the hottest girl in your guys’s graduating class, rip your galactic bong together, and go fucking spiritual on this shit. You want to do everything you wish brides would ask for, but never do. I feel you. But there has to be a line drawn somewhere, because this is getting out of hand. I spend enough time worrying about keeping up with the real-wedding Joneses as is; the last thing I need is to also worry about keeping up with Aphrodite and her hand-hewn dowry canoe that she only paddles through ancient fields up there in paragraph two.
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