Random Ramblings#3: The Wedding Dress Metaphor

A year ago (more or less), I was on Google looking at pictures of beautiful white wedding gowns (that particular time it was for some story I was trying to write, but I wouldn’t deny the fact that it is one of my guilty pleasures). I found some really elegant ones in shades of white and cream and pearl and teal and champagne and ivory but there was this one gown that really caught my eye.
I thought, that’s the kind of gown I’ll wear when (if) I get married. It was just so beautiful! I saved a picture in my phone.

As far as I was concerned, it was The One.
Occasionally, I’d show it to some friend because we were talking about some wedding or just weddings in general. One such time (it was kind of recent), a friend asked me, “What does it look like from the front?” And I said, “I don’t know!” That’s when I realized that I had never seen the full picture! I was only looking at it from that one angle and I loved the view. I was so busy admiring this particular view, I didn’t bother looking at it properly.
Now you have to understand that, very objectively, it didn’t even matter. It was simply a picture of a wedding dress I’d never even wear. I’m not even getting married, for heaven’s sake!
But after that, every time I looked at the picture, it kept bothering me. What did it look like from the front? I’d never find out.
Stumbling upon that picture the first time and saving it was like clicking a picture of a stranger you’d never see again.
So I didn’t even try.
Until one day the fact that I didn’t know was bothering me too much. Now it didn’t matter whether or not I even wanted that dress, I just had to know.
And it was on the internet- wasn’t the internet supposed to have an answer to each of your questions? A solution to each of your problems? And most of all, wasn’t it supposed to bring the world closer? Make friends out of strangers? (Because the wedding-gown-was-like-a-stranger-whose-picture-I-clicked)
So I set out looking for the gown. Never had I so strongly wished that Google could take images as ‘search terms’ or whatever you call the-stuff-you-type-into-Google.
But then it would be too easy and God knows things have never come to me easily.
I searched and searched for what was only around half an hour (45 minutes, tops) and found the exact picture I’d taken a year ago. So I’d found the website at least!
Hopefully they had a front shot of my gown (“my” meaning the gown I was looking for, and nothing else. I’m not some obsessive freak who thinks that the gown was obviously only designed for me and I was going around calling it my gown. Of course I’m not! What even gave you that idea?!?!).

Oh yes! They did! (That shouldn’t have come as a surprise really. Not everyone was as stupid as me to fall in love with like a gown because it looked good from the backside)

And well, I was disappointed.
What were you expecting?
Of course I was disappointed!
That gown is beautiful, there’s no arguing that. But for the past one year I had been misimagining it. I had created an illusion that was so perfect and so ideal that the actual picture would disappoint me no matter what!
In my head, even the model looked different (although, this girl is extremely pretty! How can people look so pretty?)
This time I had the good sense to bookmark the page whether or not I cared about the gown (sidenote: I do! I do care about the gown. I still love it!) and while writing this post (because I wanted to have one more look at it before I concluded this post) I scrolled through the reviews of the brides (or brides-to-be) who had fallen in love with the same gown that I had (even though I, unlike them, had no business falling for it). It felt really nice and made me kinda happy.

There’s no lesson I have for you.
This is just the story of how I thought I’d found the perfect wedding dress but it wasn’t really perfect. It could have been, but it wasn’t because I rushed into it and was too far gone before I even gave the dress a chance to show me all of its beauty and now I blame the dress for being itself and not a figment of my imagination where it was the most perfect thing ever!

Make of that what you will.