How to Plan the Perfect Second Wedding Over 40

You can plan the perfect wedding whether you're getting married for the first time over 40 or this is your second wedding. Here's how I planned my casual and inexpensive but still meaningful wedding using ideas from Pinterest. From the dress to the cake to the flowers, you can find ideas to make your own "I Do Take Two" a memorable day you'll treasure forever.

I know I'm not the only woman who just loves Pinterest, but you need to know that I really love Pinterest. In fact, I wrote that first sentence and didn't come back to this post for 30 minutes because I opened Pinterest "for research" and got distracted. That's a pretty common occurrence for me.

Unfortunately, though, it's all too easy to get caught up in "Pinterest Perfection": the belief that anything you try from Pinterest isn't any good at all unless it's as perfect as your inspiration pin.

And it can seem like a young woman's game, particularly if you're a bride over 40 or over 50 planning a wedding. I just did a search on Pinterest for "over 40 wedding" and I'm thrilled to see that there's a lot more content now than there was when I was planning my wedding.

Our Goals for Our Wedding

We weren't planning a big wedding, but I did want it to be special. As both the bride and wedding planner, I had a few goals for our big day:

• Stress-Free! There would be no staying up all night the night before my wedding making centerpieces for the tables.
• Cost-Effective. There would also be no four-figure flower bill. Flowers were strictly DIY. But easy DIY. 
• Reflecting Our Personality. Casey and I both share a strong love of music. I wanted our wedding to reflect that wherever I could weave it in without being too "theme wedding".
• Love. I wanted the day to be a reflection of our love for each other and our love for our friends and family who shared the day with us.

And I had a final goal that I was a little embarrassed about. But it was important to me.

• I wanted to wear a long white dress. I wore a tea-length plain white cotton Laura Ashley dress to my first wedding. There are a lot of reasons why that happened, but the bottom line is I always felt cheated out of my princess day. I didn't need a full-fledged princess day, but I wanted a long white dress that was appropriate for a 52-year old woman. Equally important - I didn't want to show my arms. 🤣

How to Use Pinterest to Plan Your Second Wedding

I created an inspiration Pinterest board to track ideas from Pinterest that met the goals I had for our wedding. You can find it here.

I pinned everything that caught my eye: wedding dresses perfect for an older bride on her second wedding, ideas for the ceremony, rings I loved, wedding decor and the all-important cake.

At first, I just used the board as a sort of mood board; pinning whatever struck my fancy. And then as the date got closer I started keeping a notebook of all the elements of the wedding along with each inspiration pin.

Our Wedding Invitation

For example, here's the pin I used as the inspiration for our wedding invitation.

I created our wedding invitation in Illustrator using the pin as inspiration.

Simple, Easy Flower Arrangements

I wanted flowers but I didn't want to have to pay a ton of money for them or spend a lot of time creating artful arrangements. So I went for the best of all possible solutions.

I followed the inspiration of this pin:

And I made things even simpler. Instead of Whole Foods, my florist was the local farmer's market and instead of creating the bouquet myself, I outsourced the job to my beautiful niece.

I think you'll agree she did a fabulous job.

The Wedding Cake

This pin was completely perfect as inspiration for a cake that showed our love for music and each other.

Here's our interpretation. The lyrics are from The Zombies, "This Will Be Out Year."

Casey and I dated for a little bit in college and then remet 30 years later so the chorus, "This Will Be Our Year, Took a Long Time to Come" has a lot of meaning for us.

A White Wedding Dress for a Woman Over 50?

As for the white dress appropriate for a middle-aged woman? It took a few pins to cobble together just the right look. First, the actual dress. I wanted something simple, elegant and timeless and this dress was just the ticket.

Well, perfect except for that thing on top of the dress! I hated that. So I replaced it with a vintage cashmere cardigan because pins like this convinced me that was the perfect solution.

And I added a sash that my sister made me to complete the outfit because I was inspired by this pin.

Here's the final result.

By the way, I saved a ton of money on my dress by buying a discontinued dress from a previous season. If I were planning my wedding now, I would absolutely try on a few of the options from Amazon. In fact, I was so inspired recently I did a whole post on all the options available.

My wedding day was one of the happiest days of my life. We had the wedding in a lovely French restaurant in Atlanta and the food was so delicious. It tasted like love, I swear.

As a wonderful added bonus, the building had, in a previous life, been my father's office so I could feel his presence blessing us even though he's no longer with us.

You can't find that stuff on Pinterest. But a pretty cake and a princess dress can help make a special day even more special.

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