When it comes to weddings, I Do! But I also Don’t. And by that I mean, I DO want to marry my husband-to-be more than anything, and was a blubbering, teary, loveable mess when he proposed over take-out breakfast from Whole Foods. I DON’T have any interest in looking for flowers, booking a photographer, picking bridesmaids or their dresses, finding a band, decorating tables—basically anything that goes along with planning the greatest day of one’s life. You know that bridal gene that most females discover around age five when they see Wedding Barbie in her taffeta wonderland? I never had that. While most girls in their adolescence were planning their weddings and tearing out pages from the wedding section of the Macy’s catalog, I was listening to Queen and riding in a neighborhood bike gang. I wasn’t a tomboy, but I also never had that perfect picture of a wedding tucked away in a pink satin box in my hope chest.

Yet, despite all my resistance, I’ve been able to put together a wedding that doesn’t look like the cover of Hampton’s Bride Magazine. Fear not, ladies. For those of you that want to have a stylish, personal wedding, but don’t want to plan, overspend, or engage with anyone in the wicked wedding industry, there is hope for you.

I’ve already been married once. At age seven I informed a boy a year younger (whom my mother babysat for) that I was ready to be married the very next day, and to please wear something nice when he showed up. We had the ceremony at noon—so my father could escort me over his lunch hour—and my mother served as the officiant. I wore vintage: my mother’s lacy slip over a pink ballet leotard, a veil made of tulle left over from her craft project and clear jelly shoes. A vision of a child-bride. After the ceremony we danced to Annie’s Song by John Denver and dined on PB&J finger sandwiches. I must say, it was the event of the seven year-old social circle. We weren’t married more than a week, when a new addition to afternoon kindergarten caught my eye. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. He wasn’t into Neil Diamond or Scooby Doo or anything I held dear. Since then I’ve had no inclination toward being a bride. Was that the pinnacle of my bridal career?

In high-school and college, I was never able to engage in talks about “dream” weddings. And even through the seven years my main man and I dated before getting engaged, my mind didn’t wander into “what if” land every time I passed a bridal boutique. I thought the idea of paying thousands of dollars for a cake was absurd. Whenever I saw cascading bouquets of perfectly placed flowers, I always wondered why they didn’t just pick some that day and save the big bills. Frankly, I never thought anything was wrong with me until four months into our engagement when friends were astonished that I hadn’t begun looking for wedding dresses.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE fashion, and a wedding dress is the pinnacle of fashion for a lady. But, the thought of going to a bridal boutique left me feeling like I just came down from a sugar high. The hubby-to-be was in the same boat. We both knew we wanted to have a wedding—duh, he proposed, I said yes—but neither of us were interested in dealing with anyone in the wedding industry. I tried buying bride magazines, thinking this would pique my interest, but I just ended up making fun of the brides and loathing the industry even more.

Bribing me with a free lunch and drugging me with champagne, my best friend took me to the dress shop where she purchased her wedding gown. I gave the woman working at the boutique a list of things I did not want on or near my dress and challenged her to bring me something that met my qualifications. She said she had just the dress. Yeah, right. Aren’t they paid to say that? Lo and behold, she appeared with a dress that took my breath away. I tried it on and cried in delight at the woman I saw in the mirror. Who the hell was that knock-out? It was the most fantastic dress I had ever worn. I knew right then, it was my dress.

From that day on, I realized what it would take to plan our wedding: our personalities. My husband-to-be and I are not conventional people, therefore we would not have a conventional wedding. Just making that promise to each other escalated our excitement to plan the wedding. We also know that we are lazy individuals when it comes to planning anything, so we hired a wedding planner. Let me tell you, ladies, it was the smartest thing we’ve done yet. Totally worth the money and piece of mind if you find the right planner. We also gave ourselves a year and a half until the big day. It seemed like a long time, but again, we know ourselves well enough to be realistic about the time it would take to plan, even with the help of a professional. Plus, we’ve never been stressed thinking we were running out of time.

It’s only five months now until the big day. Am I living in Bridezilla’s world of stress and regret? Not in the slightest. We started thinking of our wedding as the best party we’ll ever throw, and it became fun to plan. Because we’re not religious, a friend is marrying us. We kept the wedding small, with fifty people invited to attend. We’re having it at a destination, so it will be more like a holiday. We stopped looking for ideas in bridal magazines, and started going with our gut, even if it had never been done at a wedding before. We created a blog to inform our guests of our plans as they developed, and have posted FAQs and links to the destination of our wedding.

We made a priorities list of what we were willing to spend money on. We let our personalities and shared interests guide us in every decision we’ve made, and we haven’t once compromised those principles.

So maybe I’m not the Anti-Bride, maybe I’ve create a new category: The Alterna-Bride.

Following are some Web sites to help you create the alterna-wedding that you’ve never dreamed of:

Wedding Paper Divas
blue skies & Daisies
Simply Modern Weddings