Pinterest: Friend or Foe?

Personally, I dub thee Foe. 

In a world where literally everything is at our fingertips and readily available at the click of a button, little is held back from women, newly engaged and soon to be engaged brides. As a Wedding and Event planner, I believe Pinterest is aiding a hand to ruining the wedding planning process. It isn't that I don't think the ideas of many Pins are adorable and wedding worthy, but rather that there is just too much dreaming that is taking place. I like to promise my clients a stress free (or nearly stress free) day. When a bride has arranged her entire wedding off of her Pinterest dream wedding board, almost anything can go wrong.




Pinterest is a land of pretty colors and beautiful pictures. So what do you think will happen if a bride sees 5 or 6 bouquets that she loves but then cannot pick which she prefers  Well, she is most likely either going to stress about it to the verge of tears (thank you wedding emotions) or she is going to seriously tick off her florist who will most likely be told to come up with a way to make more than 8 types of flowers look perfect combined in one.

And what if she has envisioned her wedding to be EXACTLY like the photo on Pinterest that displays an out of this world cascade of light due to the perfect combination of clouds in the sky and ratio of sun beams to bridesmaids basking in said sunbeams? She will either pester the photographer to an inch of their sanity attempting to tell them, a professional, how to do their job, or shes going to melt in a puddle of nerves because her chance to copy that once in a lifetime Pinterest shot has failed.


There are too many spots for error. Jut to clarify, I am not against Pinterest in any way. I actually am guilty of Pinning this and that. Am I saying don't copy and Idea you found? No. I am simply hoping to shed light on the probably actuality that your weddings reality on this pretty side of the world is different than the land of happy Pinning that one to many a bride has fallen privy to in Pinterest World. And if only to throw a tad bit more fuel on my fire for a position in this debate, please read the following article from Jillian Stafford, a former Pinterest Addict and submission author for BuzzMedia.com. You can read the article below, or click Here. :-)

"I heard about Pinterest at a wedding reception last year and within 24 hours, I was hooked. I had to pin everything: I grabbed every vegan recipe, organizing tip, cute outfit, inspirational quote, and makeup tutorial I could get my freshly ombre-manicured fingers on. Then, a few months later, I got engaged and suddenly it was time to add a new board.

As a proud member of the one percent of Pinterest users who didn’t already have a Dream Wedding board, I started a For Real Wedding board and began to explore the site’s “Weddings and Events” category. Within five minutes, it became apparent to me that I would need to locate a rustic barn surrounded by an endless field of wildflowers. According to Pinterest, that seems to be the only place people are getting married these days.

I began the search for my Rustic Bridal Barn immediately, and was shocked to learn that they aren’t readilyavailable in my area. Or any area outside of Pinterest Land, really. I was even willing to be flexible on the field of wildflowers. Undeterred, I settled on one of the squares in Savannah, Georgia.

Having found a location, it was time to focus on decor. According to Pinterest, brides are combing the shoreline for interesting pieces of driftwood and crafting their own elaborate centerpieces. I headed to the beach confident that some ready-made driftwood centerpieces would be there waiting for me to inscribe with our initials. Once again, shock and disappointment took over. I was going to need a new centerpiece plan.

By this time, my mother had joined Pinterest, and stuff got real. We met up at the fabric store after work to discuss varying shades of burlap, because every Pinterest Wedding is made of burlap. That’s why all Pinterest Wedding candles are contained in a mason jar: to avoid an unfortunate burlap fire. Confident in my mom’s position as Burlap Manager, I turned my attention to flowers.

I met with the florist to order my twee Pinterest Wedding bouquet,  showed him no less than 22 bouquets on my pin board, and requested that he artfully combine them. I required exactly eight cabbage roses and 12 peonies and absolutely no baby’s breath. I was undecided about bridesmaid bouquets, as nobody actually pinned photos of bridesmaids with traditional bouquets anymore. Instead, there was a contest among brides to see who could convince their lifelong friends to proudly carry the most ridiculous item down the aisle. I considered giving them each a kitten wearing a jaunty hat, but eventually settled on turquoise paper parasols.

Since all Pinterest Wedding photos are majestic and ethereal, I met with my photographer to discuss how we would make this happen. I planned the time of my ceremony around the sun’s schedule. I had to walk down the aisle at the exact moment when the sun would be in the ideal position to achieve what I now call the Pinterest Wedding Ethereal Lens Flare. Through some extensive Google searching, we determined that 5:00 p.m. would be the perfect time to wed. We scheduled a two-hour block of time prior to the ceremony for photos of my bridesmaids and I happily getting ready, gazing wistfully at ourselves in the mirror, and sipping our mimosas.

It might have seemed like my Pinterest Wedding was coming along nicely, but in reality the anxiety was mounting. Unable to choose between the two, I had an elegant cake surrounded by adorable gluten-free cupcakes. We had a candy buffet with a clever sign proclaiming “Love is Sweet.”  You see, every time I planned a small detail, I would see someone do it better, with more whimsy, on Pinterest.

A few weeks before my wedding date, I’d had enough of being out-twee-ed and out whimsy-ed. I developed acute bridal apathy and quit Pinterest in a huff. After going cold turkey, I realized that Pinterest only shows us the good side of weddings. It shows a glowing example of how weddings can look when everything goes as planned. In reality? It rained all day leading up to our ceremony. The rental company didn’t set up our chairs in the park because it was raining. Our getting-ready photo shoot time was spent with my bridesmaids yelling at the rental company and me obsessively checking the weather radar. The chairs arrived 20 minutes after our ceremony was scheduled to begin. The rain stopped, the sun came out for the first time that day, and we started our ceremony 45 minutes late. We walked through the mud, so our hand-painted burlap aisle runner looked like a used coffee filter by the time I got to see it, and the bottom of my dress looked like a tea bag.

But you know what? I was so overcome with joy that I did the ugly cry all the way down the aisle and through half of the ceremony. It was perfectly imperfect, and absolutely beautiful. My Pinterest Wedding turned into a Real Wedding, and it was the most wonderful day of my life."

Jillian Stafford is a yoga teacher and recovering Pinterest addict from Savannah, Georgia. You can find her on Twitter at @jillystaff. 

Happy Planning Everyone!

xoxo

Katherine