It was love at first sight. Not my love for my husband. That developed slowly over four years. I am talking about my wedding venue. The sea-facing lawn was unlike any location I had seen in Mumbai. The afternoon I visited for a recce, the sun dusted the Arabian Sea with gold and the grass shone an emerald green. “We need to start the ceremony early. It will photograph beautifully before the sun sets,” I gushed. On the day, my husband walked into the mandap over an hour late. His kind (read: inconsiderate) groomsmen had stolen the keys to the buggy he was meant to arrive in. When our pheras finally began, an inky sky had wiped out my dream of an Instagram-perfect wedding. This could have been the beginning of our post-wedding we-never-got-goodphotos quarrel, but deep inner work saved me from falling into that dark vortex of external validation fuelled by social media.
I am not an influencer, and I didn’t expect the day to become my claim to fame. I also hadn’t grown up with a starry-eyed picture of a big wedding. The day was always meant to be an emotional and intimate rite of passage shared with close family and friends. Yet, social media had warped the meaning of marriage for me in many ways.
At every stage of the planning process, Instagram’s algorithm clung to me like a leech I couldn’t shake off. While picking a photographer, my feed led me to thousands of options that muddled my mind. When I was zeroing in on my outfit, other brides’ photos would remind me there was a better lehenga out there. When I picked my jewellery, my explore page made me believe that anything less than a three-layered necklace would relegate me to bridesmaid status.
We have been fed the idea of a big, fat Indian wedding our whole lives. But social media is more insidious. “There’s a certain amount of awareness when watching a movie that it isn’t real life. But that moment on Instagram is someone’s reality, making it more attainable in some ways. When it’s a friend of a friend who is spending millions on their wedding, it suddenly doesn’t feel so far out of your reach. The degrees of separation are few and far between, and that’s dangerous,” warns Tanya Vasunia, a psychologist and published researcher.
