The Bride Who Said “Oh” (And the Spiral That Followed)

I built one of my favorite ceremony arches to date, made a bouquet I was genuinely proud of, and handed it to a bride who said “Oh.” Here’s what happened in my head after that.

Megan | Phoenix, AZ Floral Designer | Fleur de Vie Studio

OK so let’s go all the way to 2024, back to December (cue the Swifties) … there was this wedding in Sedona. Beautiful weather, crisp air, good-vibe energy vortexes surrounding us…but something still felt off.

Everything about getting there was already giving me signs. Traffic on the way up, which, fine, it happens. Then we get to the venue and open the box for the ceremony arch, brand new, straight from the manufacturer, and it’s missing the pegs to assemble it. So we MacGyver it. Sticks, zip ties, whatever we can find, and we build the whole structure from scratch basically. Get it up. Step back. Looks incredible actually.

Side note here: normally I don’t disassemble boxes for my arch pieces because I like to store them the way they came, but this arch slightly upset me (okay fine, it down-right pissed me off) so the box naturally got taken apart and prepped for the recycle bin. Hera me out, I’m not keeping this arch if it’s missing pieces… that was too much of a headache to deal with once, never again.

Joke’s on me.

At the very end of tearing up the box we find the pegs. In a TINY little bag, sitting in a fold of the cardboard that we never would have found unless we’d completely disassembled the box

…which we did… at the very end…after the arch was already built and the ceremony was about to start.

Cool cool cool. This is fine, I’m fine. We kept moving.

The arch ended up being one of my favorites I’ve ever done for the “boho desert girl vibe”. Dried and shredded grasses woven through, quicksand roses at their most open and perfect, greenery branching out like it was growing from the structure itself. It felt like it belonged in that landscape. Like Sedona just accepted it.

Then there was the bouquet. One of my favorites to date, for real. It was textural and soft neutral colors, and just the perfect blend of romance and boho girly.

The bride showed up and I handed it to her…and she said “Oh.”

Just. Oh.

OH? OH?!!! What does that even mean?!

The spiral

Not a bad oh necessarily. Not a good oh either. Just. Oh.

I smiled, told her she looked beautiful, wished her the best wedding ever, and skedaddled because we had reception space to set up. But internally? Gone. Completely gone.

Was it bad? Did she hate it? Was the oh a polite oh? Was it an I don’t want to say what I actually think oh? Was it an I’m overwhelmed and happy oh that just came out flat because she’s nervous and it’s her wedding day oh?

I did not know. And not knowing sent me somewhere I don’t love going.

You can do a hundred incredible events. A hundred moments where someone cries happy tears or texts you at midnight saying they can’t stop thinking about the flowers or posts about you on their stories before you’ve even picked up a single stem. A hundred wins.

And then one flat oh and suddenly you’re back at square one in your own head. You suck. You missed it. You don’t belong here. Who told you that you could do this. Go back to the Vons parking lot collecting shopping carts.

Imposter syndrome doesn’t knock. It just walks in and sits down like it lives there.

What I did with it

I asked the planner later. Casually, not desperately, just hey was the bride happy with everything?

She said oh she loved it. She loved all of it. She was so happy. That’s just how she is, she doesn’t really show emotion outwardly but she will absolutely tell you if something is wrong and she said nothing was wrong.

OK. So she loved it. The oh was just an oh.

And I had to sit with that for a minute because the spiral had already happened. The damage was already done to my own head even though there was no actual damage. Which is such a specific and annoying flavor of creative anxiety, the kind where the problem was never real but the feeling absolutely was.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t fully understand then. Some people are reserved. Some people are overwhelmed on their wedding day in a way that closes them off emotionally rather than opening them up. Some people are so stressed about a hundred other things that the flowers, as beautiful as they are, land somewhere internal and quiet rather than exploding outward into the reaction you were hoping for.

That’s not about you. That’s just people being people.

HEADING: The energy mismatch thing

There are clients where everything just flows. The calls feel easy, the design process feels collaborative, the day of feels like everyone is on the same team moving toward the same thing. And then there are clients where something is just slightly off from the beginning, not bad, not wrong, just a different frequency.

This was the second kind. And I knew it going in, that quiet internal note of like, this one’s going to be a little different. The engagement through the process was lower. The enthusiasm wasn’t there the way I’m used to feeling it. And that’s OK. Not every client is going to be my energy match. Not every wedding is going to be the forest floor mushroom moment or the Chobani sparkly feeling.

Some of them are just weddings. Beautiful, well-executed, done with full care and intention, and that’s enough.

The mistake I made was letting the absence of external validation mean something about the quality of the work. Those are two completely different things and I had to learn to separate them.

What I actually believe now

If I show up with my best work, if I put everything I have into the design and the execution and the day of, that’s what matters. That’s what I can control.

What I cannot control is whether someone is a big reactor or a quiet one. Whether they’re too nervous to feel the flowers in the moment. Whether their oh means I’m speechless or just oh. 

I cannot let other people’s emotional output be the metric I use to measure my own worth as a designer. That’s a terrible system and it will absolutely break you if you let it run long enough.

The work either is what it is or it isn’t. And I know when it is. I knew with that bouquet. I knew with that arch. The oh didn’t change what those things actually were.

It just took me a minute to remember that.

And duh, now I remember faster.

If you’re a bride who shows up quietly and processes everything internally, I promise that’s completely fine. We’ll still make something incredible for you. Let’s talk.

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