A little Frustrated

glittergrrl81

I love wedding planning. I am used to looking at wedding planning sites for straight people, especially since I've been helping my bestie plan her wedding this year. But now that I am officially engaged, I'm frustrated that though there is a an option to show you are planning a gay wedding, there really isn't much offered on this site- am I missing something? I would really like to use this site to make lists, create our budget and such but I'm feeling like I don't belong here with all the bride and groom and he and she wording on EVERYTHING.... maybe I'm being over-sensitive or something, but I'm a little dissappointed that there isn't more offered to assist same-sex couples. I usually don't care and can make things work for me, and adjust how I need to- but it seems like this might not be the right site for us, which bums me out because I really want to! I know there are plenty of other sites out there, but this one is so comprehensive, with everything I need in one place....except for more gay friendly wording and ideas....I'm not suggesting the Knot become a gay site, just to be more considerate of same sex couples who come to this site.... especially now that 4 more states have legalized same sex marriage!!!

Any in-sight anyone has would be appreciated. 

joeyryan

Awww! It's OK... I think it's natural to feel that way. I think all of the Same-Sex Wedding stuff is still in its earliest phases. Those of us here right now are the pioneers! I think it's FABULOUS that theknot.com is here for us-- and the budget tool you can totally TWEAK to make it work for you. I went through and deleted anything that said "bride" (because obviously, for us there's 2 grooms) and then added a few custom entries to reflect our unique situation. You can do the same thing.

2dBride

The issue we are having is that a) gay weddings are still a relatively recent phenomenon, and b) even if gay weddings were legal in all 50 states, LGBT people are still a minority, so there would be fewer gay weddings than straight ones. 

That being said, as joeyryan points out, it's easy enough to adapt the tools on this site so that they work for our weddings.  And for about 95% of wedding stuff, our needs are exactly the same as those of straight couples.  So if you're open to using information for straight couples, and just tweaking it to meet your needs, you will find that there is a lot more available than if you restrict your search to information specifically designed for gay couples.

Indeed, that's one of the reasons that the Gay Weddings board is so quiet.  Most gay couples learn that they can look to other boards for most of the information they need.  For example, I was on the Budget Weddings board, the Jewish Weddings board, the Second Weddings board, the 40-Plus Brides board, my month and year board, and the local boards for both where I live (Washington, DC area) and my wedding venue (Boston, MA area).  Thus, this board tends to deal only with issues that are  specific to gay weddings.

I actually wrote a piece on the areas in which we needed to tweak the straight wedding information to fit our situation, which you can find at this link.  And we probably had to tweak more than most gay couples, because we had a Jewish ceremony (requiring that we switch a bunch of pronouns in Hebrew as well as English).

BrittnyDrye

I highly recommend Equally Wed (equallywed.com). It an online wedding magazine specifically for gay and lesbian couples!