When you’re getting married, there are usually lots of traditions you hear about. There are some weird and wonderful ones out there but when everyone’s talking about them, it can start to feel a little limiting. After all, how can you create the wedding that’s right for you if you have to follow the rules that everyone seems to be setting for you.
Well, we’re here to say that you shouldn’t blindly follow a set of traditions. There’s nothing wrong with breaking from the past and doing things your way. After all, this is your wedding and it should be how you want it to be. Here are some of the traditions you might want to break as you get married.
Outfit Traditions
There are so many little traditions and superstitions that guide people when they’re putting together outfits for their wedding. Some say the bride should wear something new, something borrowed and something blue on her wedding day. Others say she shouldn’t wear her full outfit at any point before the wedding day. These things don’t really mean anything though and you shouldn’t be afraid of breaking them.
Dates and Days
A lot of people think that your wedding shouldn’t fall on particular days or should be in a particular month. And then there’s a long list about what the weather on your wedding means for the future of your marriage. All of this stuff is pretty unhelpful and doesn’t have any real bearing on how your marriage will play out, so don’t feel pressured into holding your wedding in a certain month, day of the week or time of the year. What’s the worse that could happen?
Paper Programs
Creating paper programs for your wedding is a tradition that goes back a long time, but it can be time consuming, wasteful and pretty much pointless in many instances. These days, you can send all the information your guests need about the wedding day directly to them via email, so why not just do that? It’ll save time, save resources and save money. All of those things tend to be in short supply when you’re planning a wedding. Sending out an email takes a lot less time and effort, leaving you time to focus on other things.
The Bouquet Toss
The bride’s bouquet toss is one of the oldest traditions in the book when it comes to weddings. However, not everyone likes it and it can be a little old-fashioned in ways that probably aren’t ideal today. You can replace it with some other kind fun game if you want to. There are plenty of options out there and they don’t carry the awkwardness and out of date connotations of the bouquet toss.
Not Choosing Your Rings
A lot of the time, grooms choose the engagement ring that they offer to their bride to be, and that makes sense. But it’s increasingly the case that men buy cheap placeholders that can later be replaced by a ring of his partner’s choosing. That might be something you want to explore as well. There are some great round halo diamond engagement rings to choose from and you might not trust your partner to choose the right one.
Gift Tables
Gift tables are becoming a thing of the past for many couples. They can seem entitled and they put pressure on guests, which isn’t ideal. If you want to do something different, you can make it informal, ask guests to donate to charity instead or even ask for favors from guests. After all, you need all the help you can get when you’re planning a wedding and trying to get everything done on time for the big occasion. It’s a nice way of taking gift buying pressures off your guests as well.
Bridesmaid Traditions
There are traditions around what bridesmaids should wear and even how many of them there should be. Some people believe there should only ever be an even number of bridesmaids, but it’s not clear why that’s the case! You should choose however many bridesmaids you feel is right for your wedding and organize outfits however you like. These rules and traditions are unnecessarily restrictive.
There are some traditions that are simply no longer relevant and that don’t need to be followed. If you’re getting married, there’s nothing wrong with doing things your way, so don’t feel like you have to listen to all the superstitions and follow all of the traditions that everyone’s telling you about because you don’t.
