Lauren Rodrigue
Jezebel
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Past articles by Lauren:
A Holiday Gift Guide for the Almost-Bride
You know who is probably not being showered with enough gifts and attention just for making the huge relationship decision she and her significant other made recently? The bride-to-be in your life. Hear me out. → Read More
A Very Wedding Instagram Account Primer, Part I
If the world of wedding blogs is a candy-colored, calligraphed, calla-lillied carnival, then wedding Instagram is without a doubt that carnival’s champagne-wasted, sugar-high sideshow. When I got engaged, I started following The Knot, thinking it would set a fire under my ass to get me to start planning. Then, little by little, I started following more, because of this column, because I needed… → Read More
Say Yes to the Engagment Photos: A Breakthrough, Courtesy of My Wedding Photographer
Is there any reason to want engagement photos? Of course not, say the newly engaged, and the unengaged, and me, once upon a time. What is the overall point, for starters? To show off that you and him can stand on a rock? To show off your pink polyester blouse? To show off that your ring can go onto the stem of a leaf? And you have to realize that you’re not a person that in any other time in her… → Read More
My Bridal Fitness Plan
For the past eight weeks I’ve been waking up and doing 135 crunches before I do anything else. I pad into the living room at 7:10 a.m., unroll my yoga mat, hook my toes under the hem of our IKEA couch, and crunch, barely awake. I do 15 where my wrists graze the tops of my knees, 15 where my fingertips tap the tops of my feet, and then 15 laying flat, lifting my legs straight up from the hips and… → Read More
Veil Yeah: My Obsession With a Contentious Swath of Tulle
I did not expect to give any shits about veils, to be honest. They are just one or a few layers of airy fabric, and they are usually only available in like, three colors, and like, four styles, and all you do is poke them into the back of your head for like, 30 minutes, and for what reason? I never thought of veils at all, whenever I indulged daydreams of my wedding day. But then, I never… → Read More
A Bump in the Wedding Road, a Financial Freakout
Everything is going great! will be my last words, just as they are for so many others—right before Satan’s pitchfork sails through the space between my back ribs, pierces my heart and lungs in one sanguine grab, and I am hauled away, bobbing like a chunk of sirloin on a kebab, down all the flights of stairs to hell, where I will be roasted, like a summer dinner, over forlorn flames. → Read More
5 Insane Things From Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine, Fall 2015
Is it the hardening of one’s heart that makes one less and less impervious to envy with each passing issue of Martha Stewart Weddings as one’s wedding clock ticks and ticks on? My wedding clock admonishes, “Nine months left, young lady!” and with that I book and book, plan and plan, dig and dig myself further into the buttercream trench, and I find now that looking at Martha Stewart Weddings… → Read More
'Wedding Inspiration' Photo Shoots Are Killing Me Not-So-Softly
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… → Read More
It's Not So Easy to Say Yes to the Dress
If you were to ask me about my dress shopping right when I’d started the process, I’d probably gush all over your face about the incredible power of seeing oneself as wholly beautiful for the first time, the unprecedented bonding opportunity between mother and daughter that is picking out the latter’s first-ever armful of white gowns, and the Christmas morning-style excitement that rattles the… → Read More
Why Is It So Fucking Hard to Figure Out How Much a Wedding Will Cost?
Recently, I looked back at the preliminary wedding budget my fiancee Joe and I had come up with it about six months ago after approximately 16 seconds of internet research. Now, I’ve realized that it was all so horrifically off-base, it might as well have been written in ancient runes. It was like when you ask a toddler how much money they think their parents make every year, and they say… → Read More
4 Things You Should Never Have to Hear if You're Planning a Wedding
If you’ve ever dared to utter the “W”-word in conversation with a group of 20-somethings in a major American metropolis, chances are you’ve opened the door to an onslaught of stock responses. Pew-pew-pew! Like little silver BBs they fly out of people’s mouths, these most disparaging opinions about weddings, aimed not to hurt so much as sting, with a smile. → Read More
5 Insane Things From Martha Stewart Weddings Magazine, Summer 2015
Not gonna lie: I’ve been sort of nailing it these past couple weeks in the wedding planning department. I’ve narrowed down my dress to just two gorgeous contenders, we’re about to sign a contract with a wonderful caterer, and we’ve decided we’re going to design our own paper suite. For the first time as a bride-to-be, I’m starting to feel like I’m actually planning a wedding, rather than… → Read More
The Wedding Gowns I Didn't Want, and What I Learned From Them
Over the course of three short days last week, my mother and went shopping for dresses, hers and mine. It was my first crack at it and we trotted around Manhattan and Brooklyn at a fever pitch: five appointments for me, four hours spent looking for a dress for her, and countless time spent in the throes of existential discussion. Plus cab fare. All this while temperatures hit the mid-ninetites,… → Read More
Wherein Picking a Wedding Caterer Becomes an Expensive Identity Crisis
Last week I officially passed the “one year left” mark on my wedding planning calendar. Between celebrating and freaking out, I realized I had to get to work on the Next Big Thing on my planning to-do list: Finding a caterer. My mother was insistent. My dad, resolute: “There has to be food!” → Read More
I'm Learning What 'For Worse' Means Before We Even Get Married
When Joe and I adopted Cheddar, a scared, three-year-old blonde terrier mutt who looked like a small, fat, elderly lion, I was excited to have our first shared responsibility. It was a first step toward a long life of joining forces and making real, living things happier and healthier and stronger than they would otherwise be without us. Raising a dog was a teamwork-driven endeavor that would… → Read More
Five Godawful Wedding DIY Ideas From Pinterest
On a scale of one to ten—one being Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, who is literal royalty and has never touched a scissor, and ten being Martha Stewart’s youngest, thirstiest Craft Assistant, who probably got engaged at a goose farm last June and has an Exacto knife in place of one of her Jamberry nail wraps—I’d say my level of “DIY Bride-ness” is about a five. → Read More
I've Got My Mind on My Money and My Wedding on My Mind
A good reason to not marry me is that I am not exactly a financial genius. While I’ve always been good at making my own money rather than asking for it (except for when I asked the federal government for $50,000 to go to college with and they were like, “Yes, def,”), paying bills the moment my paycheck dumps into my bank account, and shopping wisely at the grocery store, I am not terribly good… → Read More
I Thought My Engagement Ring Would Act as a Shield Against Men. Nope.
Does my engagement ring conjure a force field when I wield it against prying men? It feels as though it should. It certainly became my new knee-jerk protector—just as a middle finger, rolled eyes, and a husky “fuck you” were back in my single days. → Read More
Five Wedding Dresses I Want But Cannot Have
Before I met my fiancé, I believed that true love existed in clothes and not much else. A silk blouse that flowed softly like a nice dinner date, a floral sundress that swung at the hips like the prom dance I never had, a pair of tight little shorts that hugged my butt hot as sex—I hunted these things, but not love. → Read More
Maybe I Should See if My Fiancé Has an Actual Opinion About Our Wedding?
Wherein our columnist, currently in early stages of planning her wedding, has a GChat conversation with her fiancé to discuss how, exactly, this shit is going to go down. → Read More