At the tender age of 49, I fell in love. After a year of dating, my true love moved in with me, into the home where I had raised my children as a single mom. The youngest child had recently moved out on her own, giving my love and me plenty of space to enjoy our new shared nest. Following the path of most love nests, this one morphed into something more prosaic over time, but it also endured. After a few years, he, who had never been married, popped the question. Having been married before, I had a few qualms, but also knew we had already worked out the essential quirks of the relationship.

We are both artists, and he is a musician as well. We settled down to planning our wedding with all the frustration, arguments, and obsessive joy that artists bring to any shared creative endeavor. I had a length of old red Chinese brocade that I wanted to make into a wedding dress. Late at night I would get home from my work as a nurse and cruise the internet looking for design inspiration. Quickly I ran into what I found to be a very odd phenomenon. No matter what terms I typed into various search engines, I wasn’t turning up anything related to middle-aged bride, grey-haired bride, older bride, etc. I got hits that showed young women in grey bridesmaid dresses. Unh-huh. There were plenty of returns for mother of the bride outfits. Unh-huh. Late one night I found a sole image of two middle-aged lesbian brides in chaste beige suits. Unh-huh. No matter what I searched for, what turned up was very young models in white, pale pink or champagne frills. Ridiculously expensive dresses that were so not me…not at age 53, not really me at any age.

I wanted something saucy, outrageously beautiful, sexy yes, but also elegant, not campy. I wanted to look like myself, even though I felt at a loss to describe exactly what that look would be. Which was why I kept searching for images to help me narrow it down.

Never had I conducted an internet search that returned such a poverty of results. I became curious about this. I was forced to think about what it was that I was seeking and why there didn’t seem to be any images out there that matched it.

Why did we want a wedding anyway, I wondered, and what did it mean to be a bride? One dictionary defines the word bride as, “a woman on her wedding day or just before and after the event.” Simple enough. No age limitations inherent there. And yet, the idea of a bride also contains within it notions about purity, virginity, a once and only time in a woman’s life. The word is further associated with concepts like dowry and bride-price, the tradition of women once belonging literally to men, like property. Women beyond their twenties certainly do get married, but are not associated with the archetype of the bride much beyond that age.

Over the past 50 years the image of the bride has become extravagantly entwined with fantasies of being a princess. In the age of the Disney Princess, girls start training early. Toddlers propped up in the seats of grocery carts sport sparkly pink tiaras while their exhausted mothers search the aisles for affordable produce. A couple of decades later, these same girls will be spending the price of a down payment for a house on one sensationally hyped day of their lives. They diet, exhaust lines of credit, work out, and drive themselves and those around them crazy in a phenomenon that has come to be known as Bridezilla.

Avoiding this narcissistic nightmare was not what was nagging me as I tried to sort out what I wanted. What surprised me was the stark lack of images reflecting the lives and desires of middle-aged and older women getting married. As my frustration grew, so did my evaluation of what having a wedding meant at this time in my life. How exactly did I want to live out this rite in terms of dress, place, and ceremony?

Seven years later, my husband and I look back on our wedding as equal parts meaningful transition and great party. I cannot overstate the advantage of having over five decades of life experience for traversing that territory. Being older, it was easier to laugh at the inevitable bumps encountered. It was easier to simultaneously take care of others’ needs while also summoning the fuck-all courage to do things exactly the way that reflected who we were. This turned out to be a winning combination for a relaxed and fun day.

Getting married at age 53 opened up unexpected opportunities for examining my life as a feminist. I had to give the finger to established notions about female beauty, sexuality, and rites of passage as an aging woman. In the process, my ideas about what it means to be a bride extended beyond the borders of weddings, of getting married to a man or a woman. Being a bride can mean continuing to reinvent yourself after the age where society ceases to recognize you as a vital, creative human. It can mean cultivating your own sense of romance and adventure, whether or not you choose to partner with someone else, and regardless of cultural images that deride you beyond a certain age if you are female.

This website grew out of a particular set of circumstances in my life. But it is also about how women everywhere are subjected to a disappearance that culture enacts on us as we grow older. Let us light candles, march, throw the symbolic Molotov cocktails of our creativity into the face of this dehumanizing process. If you are a young woman reading this blog, embrace your own grey-haired bride. Cultivate her acquaintance now, so that you can look forward to whatever your life will bring you with courage, delight, and synthesis.