Bad Bridesmaid (17 page)

The ceremony was being held an hour and a half away from the California town where Kelli and Brooke went to school, and they had no place to stay the night before the wedding, so they told The Bride they would just come down on Saturday and skip the rehearsal altogether. “How hard is it to walk down the aisle?” Brooke reasoned.

The Bride had no patience for this classic Bad Bridesmaid logic, and had other plans for her attendants. She wanted them to spend the night with her before the wedding, keeping her company in a luxurious hotel room that they would split three ways. Stunned but unwilling to say no because they believed Bad Bridesmaid karma would be visited upon them during their own weddings, the two women drove to the rehearsal site, participated in the run-through, and then went to a bar to drink alone while the rest of the family had dinner. The next morning, as they nursed their hangovers and growing resentment, The Bride
informed them that she was moving immediately into the bridal suite and that they would promptly have to check out of the room they’d all shared the night before.

“There’s three hours until the wedding, and we have nowhere to go,” Brooke said. “We’re like, what are we supposed to do, sit down on the floor in front of the bridal suite?”

Eventually, it was time for the wedding. The ceremony was mercifully short and attended by only about fifty guests. By 9:00 p.m. dinner had been served, the speeches spoken, and Kelli and Brooke were sitting at a table with The Bride’s teenage brother, bored out of their minds.

“So I look over at Kelli and say, ‘I have to get out of here,’” Brooke remembered. “‘How long do you think it would take to get to Amy’s wedding?’”

Kelli looked at her friend with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye and replied in a loud voice, “Oh my God, I think my face is swelling.”

The twenty-six-year-old actually suffers from a condition called angioedema, which is basically a severe allergic reaction to everything from dust to spider bites. It is also, conveniently enough, the most perfect “out” imaginable.

“So I go, ‘Oh my God, it is,’” said Brooke, her voice filled with mock concern. “‘We’re going to have to go home and get your medicine!”’

With that, Kelli ran to the hotel valet and picked up her car, while Brooke informed The Bride of the impending fake medical emergency.

“We got in the car and drove to the other wedding and stayed there for the rest of the night,” Brooke said. “It was so fun.”

The next day, the women received an e-mail from The Bride. She did not ask about Kelli’s condition or thank them for their help with her day. She told them that the cost of their valet parking had been charged to her room and that they owed her forty-two dollars.

“I don’t even think she really cared that we left. We had served our purpose,” said Brooke. “And I haven’t heard from her since.”

I
t is sad to admit that a wedding ended one of the great love affairs of my life. I had prized my friendship with The Bride, as different as we were, and had even joked in a toast at her shower that she was cheating on me with her groom-to-be. Her previous boyfriends had brought us closer, I laughed, giving us something to complain about and discuss over drinks, and I was jealous that she had finally found someone who would make her girlfriends take second place.

In the end though, it was her wedding—not her man—that would put an end to our friendship.

Since her beautiful day, which I observed from the back row, we have seen each other only at dinner parties held by mutual friends. I was demoted from her bridal party, and we slipped from each other’s lives.

It may seem silly, but weddings have been shown to create more stress than most other experiences in a person’s life, from job interviews to army interrogations. No one will argue that planning a large-scale event with such lasting importance can breed sleepless nights for the bride and groom and their respective families. Few people acknowledge, though, the brunt of the stress born by bridesmaids.

In 2001, a doctoral student at Ohio State University named Montenique Finney wanted to determine whether having a friend around during a stressful situation made things better or worse, and she selected forty college-age women to act as her guinea pigs. To get their blood boiling, Finney had them prepare a two-minute speech on a hypothetical situation. She could have chosen war or famine, politics or pop culture—topics most likely to get someone good and riled up. Instead, she had the women pretend they were bridesmaids—Maids of Honor, in fact—and that their dresses had been delivered one week before the wedding with major design flaws.

Each of the women was asked to write down what she would say to the store manager when she learned of this fashion disaster, and then perform her make-believe rant for the researcher in a role-playing exercise. Finney must have been a wedding attendant herself at one point, because this scenario could only have been dreamed up by a former Bad Bridesmaid with a wicked sense of humor.

Finney took blood samples to establish het subjects’ cholesterol levels and found that all of the women experienced a dramatic rise in stress as they got more and more worked up delivering their angry dress diatribes. And here’s where it gets interesting: half of the test subjects also had a friend standing at their side as they reamed out the imaginary store clerk. Those women had cholesterol levels
three times
as high as those who ranted alone.

Finney concluded that, contrary to popular belief, friends do not help you calm down, and advised women to leave their girlfriends at home when entering a stressful situation—words of wisdom that could save generations of wedding attendants from dangerous tours of duty.

Because it’s not Bad Bridesmaids who cause the problems—it’s the stress. It’s been scientifically proven.

Sadly, I am neither the first nor the last woman to be dismissed from a friend’s bridal party. Some brides decide that their attendants have been consistently unhelpful and do not deserve a front-row seat, giving them their walking papers after prolonged deliberation. Others experience a blowout (and not the hundred-dollar kind) over an outfit hated or obligation unmet. The weddings go on, but the friendship is rarely salvaged.

Keltie H. was kicked out of the wedding of one of her best and oldest friends, a woman she now considers dead to her. There were four bridesmaids, all of whom had hung out with The Bride and one another since high school, tight for more than ten years. Keltie and another bridesmaid, Tia, were still in school when the engagement took place, and did not have the money or time to
throw themselves into the wedding prep with abandon. By the time January rolled around, just halfway through the yearlong engagement, the two Bad Bridesmaids had already said no to several excursions and shown up late for a dress shopping trip, having driven to The Bride’s hometown after class on a Friday.

The Bride was fed up.

“She said, ‘You guys don’t care about my wedding. Your number-one priority is school,” Keltic remembered. “And I said, ‘Yes, it is.’”

The Bride was not willing to take a backseat to higher education, so she kicked the two bridesmaids to the curb. They were furious, and amazed when two of the other bridesmaids sided with The Bride and stopped talking to them as well.

After ten years of friendship and just six months of lackluster bridesmaiding, the women did not even get an invitation to the wedding. They sent The Bride a dozen roses on the day of the ceremony and a card that said, “Hope you’re having a great day.” Which color of roses denotes sarcasm, I wonder?

Keltie has now been a bridesmaid four times in total, and never had a problem with any other bride, but she has not spoken to the woman who gave her the boot—or the other bridesmaids—since the days after her dismissal.

“I can’t forgive someone who did that to me. It’s brutal. Everyone knows we’re in your wedding party and now everyone knows we’re not. It is a public embarrassment,” she said. “To me that’s the end of the friendship.”

Remember Giselle, who was kicked out of her friend’s wedding on the morning of the ceremony? She and another bridesmaid drove home in a state of shock, thinking, “Is this really happening?”

Both women were upset—they had just been screamed at in a crowded mall after refusing to have their makeup redone for a fourth time—but neither was yet willing to accept that such a petty argument spelled the end of their involvement in their friend’s wedding. With time still remaining before The Bride walked down the aisle, they called her cell phone and asked if she was ready to change her mind. Despite the nasty words and the public humiliation, Giselle said, both women were willing to stand at The Bride’s side throughout her wedding rather than create more controversy in absentia. The Bride was not so understanding, and instead of apologizing to her bridesmaids, she hung up on them.

After the initial shock wore off and Giselle had scrubbed all traces of costume makeup from her tear-stained face, the ousted bridesmaid’s sadness turned to anger. Her mother had thrown The Bride a shower, and their family had f$eCted her with gifts she was unlikely to return. Giselle had spent four hundred dollars alone on a full-length red velvet dress and matching opera-length gloves, which remain to this day wrapped in plastic in the dismissed bridesmaid’s closet.

She estimated that her friend’s wedding cost her more than a thousand dollars, and concluded that her investment should be paid back in full. Signing on to be a bridesmaid, she reasoned, is a contractual agreement where women consent to spend money on gifts, showers, and dresses in exchange for a walk-on role in the wedding. Not necessarily a fair trade, but a well-established barter of money for prestige. Giselle considered her friend in breach of contract, and she wasn’t going to walk away without a fight.

She contacted a lawyer and asked if she was in a position to sue, and though the lawyer agreed that theoretically a contract
had been violated, he told her it wasn’t worth the hassle of a trip to court.

“He said I would be stuck in a legal battle for years, ‘Over what—a dress?’”

In retrospect, Giselle probably should have contacted a female lawyer, more likely to have been a bridesmaid once herself—because anyone who’s been in wedding knows that a dress is never just a dress. With a crusading former wedding attendant on her side, imagine the news coverage of the precedent-setting case:

Instead, Giselle is just another girl who got slapped with the Bridal Backhand, destined to have jokes made at her expense for eternity. Her dramatic expulsion has become a running comedy routine in her family, who enjoy teasing her for failing to be Good Bridesmaid material. Whenever she is asked to stand up for a friend (and she has been twice since then), her parents question the bride to make sure she knows what sort of attendant she’s getting.

“Are you sure you want to have Giselle in the wedding?” they ask innocently. “Do you know what happened last time?”

There is no equation that can calculate a woman’s likelihood of being a bridesmaid, but if you take the number of your female friends (X) divided by a variable of closeness (Y), subtracting those you will lose to international moves or the Church of Scientology (Z), and multiply by Murphy’s Law, you may have a rough estimate of how many times you will have to go through it.

Some women manage to avoid the role entirely, and I would hazard a guess that these people live longer, like pampered celebrities or the inhabitants of a tranquil Pacific island untouched by technology or war. They should be rounded up and studied, their pheromones extracted and speech patterns monitored so we can establish the root of their immunity and then make millions marketing a bridesmaid vaccine.