Second Thoughts

For the past few months I have been struggling with falling out of love with my wedding dress. Don't get me wrong the dress is beautiful and is exactly what I was looking for when I initially started planning. Our wedding is like our style, contemporary traditional. We like traditional designs but with cleaner lines, more graphic patterns, and sometimes with a little pop of pizazz. The dress that I picked is traditional in that it is a strapless ballgown, satin, and has little button details and it is a little contemporary with the dropped waist and ruching.

As time has passed though I have stopped looking at the dress as just "the dress" and started looking at it as "the dress for me". I am pint-size, pocket-size, fun-size however you would like to describe 5" 1' , that is me. The more I tried the dress on the more I found the ballgown overwhelming for my frame. As well as begin miniature I also have miniature tatas that just weren't coming close to filling out the dress regardless of bustiers, cutlet inserts, tissues... I am sure some of these issues could be fixed with alterations but I am at the point where I don't want to have to the force to dress to work for me I want the dress to compliment me naturally.

From this experience I have identified a few things that might have contributed to my dress regret:

-No experienced shoppers. No one I know has gotten married in the last ten years and frankly they have pretty unrealistic expectations about wedding dresses including price. I mean my mom's dress cost $100, my aunt's $40, my cousin's $250 and so on and so forth. These expectations definitely influenced my choice to shop at retail bridal stores and to only consider dresses in the $500 range.

-No shopping around. I went to two different stores of the same chain. End of story. I just didn't know what was out there.

-No time. I purchased my dress about five weeks into my thirteen month engagement. At the time I thought I was doing a good thing by getting as much wedding planning out of the way early because I knew we were going to have a lot of life events occuring in the few months before the wedding. I'll admit it... I was wrong. I really wish I would have let myself marinate longer in the wedding planning process before making such a big purchase.

-Careless. As much as I tried to convinence myself through the whole dress process that it was not that imporant, it was only for one day, and it wasn't worth that much money.....it was futile. Because in the end it is that important and worth that much money for one day that you will never get to repeat.

-Pressuring myself. I tried way too hard to make everything including my dress fit into this matchy-matchy box I like to call wedding planning. I have since learned to let go of matchy-matchy and have moved more towards coordinating or complimenting.

So what now?

Have you ever had buyer's remorse? What did you do?