Photo by: Victoria Saint Martin The content influencer industry has made our world feel like a pressure cooker. Pressure to keep up. Pressure to have it all. Pressure to be endlessly “authentic” and “transparent.” Pressure to be effortless. Pressure to be cool. Pressure to be nice all the damn time. The Wedding Industry has skillfully taken that pressure, bottled it, and hosed down every couple who has ever thought about getting married. We’ve so successfully taken FOMO, keep

Photo by: Candace Sims Photography Scroll WeddingTok for 5 minutes and you’re bound to come across couples talking about “wedding tax:” the idea that mentioning the word “wedding” automatically makes everything more expensive, and honestly? It’s mostly true, and if I ever found myself at one of those local PowerPoint debate nights, I would probably be spending my time defending why it makes sense that weddings cost more for most services. However, that’s not what this post is

Photo: Rachel Welling Photography When you start planning your wedding, you find yourself asking questions like: Who do we want to invite? How much do we want to spend and who's contributing? Where do we want to get married? What do we hate about the weddings we've attended? What do we love about the weddings we've attended? Band or DJ? What aesthetics do we love? Who do we want standing up with us? What kind of experience do we want our guests to have? But one question I don

Photo: Fuller Photo Co Over the years, I’ve become known as one of Chicago’s go-to planners for queer weddings. While a large portion of my clients are queer couples, I also work with plenty of straight couples, and I’ve noticed some interesting differences in how each group approaches wedding planning. To be clear, I don’t think queer couples are inherently better planners. But I do think the experience of being queer often creates a different lens through which couples appr