It wasn’t the dream wedding Rachel Sifuentes, 28, envisioned as a little girl.

No walking down a church aisle. No DJ at the reception. No white dress.

Instead, Sifuentes and her husband followed their attendants dancing down the center lane of a bowling alley where the neatly lined-up pins faded into the background. The ladies didn’t carry flowers, but waved long ribbons. The bridal party relied on an iPod for entertainment. The bride wore a silky deep-blue gown — the groom’s favorite color — purchased at a discount.

“Luckily, everything turned out to be great,” said Sifuentes, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, and wanted to save money because her salary at the law firm where she works had been reduced.

Sifuentes’ bowling alley wedding in January may not have been traditional, but the creative ceremony saved her thousands of dollars at a time when wallet tightening has become necessary for many American families. Her offbeat wedding is representative of a growing trend, wedding experts say, as brides are discovering cheap can be chic, and also inspire innovative party ideas.

“Necessity breeds ingenuity,” said Ariel Meadow Stallings, a writer who runs the online bridal site Offbeat Bride.

She explains what has ushered in the recent trend of frugal yet creative brides: “It’s the combination of the economy with the fact that through the ’90s, there was a big explosion of the wedding industrial complex.”

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Engaged couples throughout the Northwest are ramping up for summer wedding season, planning one of life’s biggest — and potentially most expensive and stressful — moments.

But some couples are bucking recent trends toward elaborate weddings, pushing aside traditions that don’t fit their personalities or budgets.

This is where Seattle author Ariel Meadow Stallings comes into the picture…

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“Despite my immediate interest in Cringe, I’d never attended a diary reading show and had no idea how it would work or what kinds of readings would be funny,” Stallings said. “I just wasn’t sure where the line was between entertaining and pathetic/self-indulgent.”

Salon of Shame meets every other month at Theatre Off Jackson, which seats 150. During the past three years, it has developed such a cult following that tickets usually sell out within minutes of becoming available.

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… Yet these days, plenty of women who don’t necessarily identify as feminists are including more egalitarian moments in their wedding, says Ariel Meadow Stallings, author of Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for the Independent Bride.

Some, for example, ask both to parents walk the bride and groom down the aisle.

For them, she says, it’s not necessarily feminist — just modern.

“You don’t have to identify as a feminist to be squicked out by the idea of being your father’s property to be given away.”

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“When I first told my husband what I was going to do, he was dubious,” says Stallings. “He’s the one who brings me the laptop in bed. But I’m in my 10th week now and it’s going great. I’m doing a lot more reading and crafting and even taking a dance class.”

Stallings calls her project a “raging success,” although there are still occasional twinges of online envy.

“My husband’s not doing the unplugged thing; he doesn’t feel he needs to,” she says. “So there are nights that I’m unplugged and he’s checking his e-mail and surfing on his laptop, and I’m like, ‘Grrrrr.’”

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Reporter: A lesson for home as well. Ariel Meadow Stallings evenings were constant busy work. On the internet, on her cell phone, email from work.

Ariel: I would just watch hours sort of slip away.

Reporter: Now, one night ever week, she turns off the electronics.

Ariel: There’s just a re-engagement in the world — that sense of how time passes.

Reporter: …Discovering life just works better when there’s time to think.

Watch full segment here.

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Sharon Sarmiento knew it was time to unplug when she realized she was blogging in her dreams and hearing imaginary instant messages.

For Ariel Meadow Stallings, it was the hours lost while surfing the Internet that left her feeling like she had been in a drunken blackout.

Stallings, 33, a Seattle author, blogger and part-time marketing manager for Microsoft Corp, made a resolution in January to spend “52 Nights Unplugged” this year.

“I love technology. I’m not a Luddite. But I realized it was a problem when I would sit down to check my email and it was almost like I would wake up six hours later and find I was watching videos of puppies on YouTube.

“I’d try and think what I had been doing for the past two hours and I had no idea. I associate that kind of time loss with blackouts when you’re drunk,” she said.

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THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they’ve read so far this year), to the corporate world.

For the record, I believe the journalist is referring to some other “wired type” with the book reading thing. I could never brag about how many books I’ve read this year, since the number is about, oh, two — the most recent being a vampire novel written for 13 year old girls.

…But speaking of books, cross your fingers that this makes things easier for my literary agent, who’s been shopping around my book pitch for 52 Nights Unplugged: A Digital Junkie’s Rehab.

Anyway, I love the closing paragraph of the article:

Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

Read the whole thing: I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.