“I can’t go through with this,” she says to me as I’m wiping tears from her cheeks no faster than new ones are appearing. “I know this is what I thought I wanted, but I just can’t do it.” This won’t be the last time I here those words come from a bride’s mouth, and it certainly wasn’t the first. Not every woman feels this way moments before walking down the aisle, but there’s still that occasional scared soul that forgets the tedious process that brought them to this decision in the first place.

I wasn’t the ideal candidate to talk this woman back into taking her vows, but given the career choice I made, I found myself sitting in this seat more than I wish to count. It’s my job to finish off what everyone else involved in a wedding started (and to make sure the bride loves it all in the end). To make her look sexy where the hairstylist left off, virginal as the minister would hope, and loving as the groom always knew her to be. About that last one, I wish I could say that this type of conversation always ended that greatly, but unfortunately I’m not exactly a miracle worker. I’m just the photographer.

On this particular occasion I am sitting across from Dianna, and rest assured I somehow manage to work my magic once again. Not that I would call myself a relationship expert by any means, but when you’ve been working weddings for as long as I have been, you start to learn a thing or two. It’s a beautiful thing, love is, or so I am told. I’ve never bothered to take that final plunge, but I guess that’s not really surprising to me. Something like that old saying, if you spend all day making cheesecake for a living, you tend not to eat a lot of it. So I don’t dally to much into love, aside from working for the business of it.

Where was I though, oh, sitting with Dianna. She’s particularly tearful, this one. And with only moments to go before everyone expects to see her graceful entrance, I do best I can to put her together with simple words that almost always do the trick, “Dianna, I know you’re nervous, but this is truly the easy part. If it’s instead that you can’t picture the next 40 years of you life with David, than I urge you to get out now and I’ll go let everyone know,” David was her future husband who was probably getting a little nervous at the current delay in the rest of his life. Dianna sat for a moment, and I could almost see the mental movie of what’s not yet her memories rolling through her mind. It wasn’t long and she was walking past me to the mirror, carefully rearranging her hair. “Nope, this is definitely what I want,” she said finally, “lets go get me wed.” Once her eyeliner and lip gloss was reapplied, Dianna smiled at me through the mirror and I took a quick snapshot of her (which later everyone would claim to be such timeless perfection). Finally, I was opening the door where she took her father’s arm and we were on our way.

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Tags: Beautiful Thing, Miracle Worker, Plunge

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