Authors: Siri Agrell
Other women are Chronic Bridesmaids, walking down the aisle twice a year from the time their first sorority sister pulls the
trigger on a shotgun wedding until their fingers are raw from clapping politely and clawing for the bouquet.
The rest of us fall somewhere in between, participating in a handful of weddings during our late twenties and early thirties and then doing our best to erase the memories, chalking them up to a “phase,” like same-sex kisses in university or wearing dresses over jeans.
But relying on the fact that our bridesmaid days are numbered, ending as our last friend ties the knot or settles for artificial insemination, overlooks our responsibility to bridesmaids of the future, who deserve to be saved like so many helpless seal pups. According to the Fairchild Bridal Bank, the Echo Boom—children of the Baby Boomers who were born between 1979 and 2002—will soon move into the “engagement zone,” that exciting period of their late twenties when diamonds start flying like buns in a food fight. This means that more than seventy-one million men and women will get hitched and will require bridesmaids over the decades to come, an entire generation of women paralyzed by the duties of their friends’ wedding preparations. Their careers will suffer, their sense of fashion will atrophy, and they will come to believe that lobster tail always tastes cold and rubbery. Before this sad day when women are forced to spend an entire decade in bridesmaid-related meetings and men are left to wander the streets alone, we must learn how to say no when someone pops the question, or at least how to politely escape some of the more onerous tasks.
Madison V., who is thirty-one, has been a bridesmaid eight times since her early twenties, and said she has never contemplated saying no to any of her engaged friends.
“I never thought about saying no because it’s never been an option. Well,” she retracted, “I’ve thought about it, but the words have never left my lips.”
Some women have a hard time turning down any offer (and we all know what to call them); others say yes because they have deluded themselves into thinking that it won’t be so bad this time. Summer J. has been a bridesmaid six times, and said it was exciting only twice, when she was young and the concept of weddings was romantic and new. Back then, the thought of a friend getting married was exotic and came with a chance to dress up, make an emotional speech, and drain the open bar.
“Once you get to like twenty-nine, thirty, weddings are getting a bit old, and the whole thing’s just a hassle,” she said. “Every single time I’m asked to be a bridesmaid now, I think, ‘Oh, God.’ People are buying gowns for their grade-eight grads now. So imagine what they expect for their wedding.”
Summer wishes she had persuaded her friend The Bride to tone down those expectations during her engagement, because she is now carrying them into motherhood. Three months before giving birth to her first child, she called Summer to complain that no one had offered to organize a baby shower. This was because all of her former bridesmaids were still recovering from the nightmare of their wedding experience, during which they’d had to arrange and pay for various parties, showers, and events.
“She was so horrified that people would see that she didn’t have a baby shower,” Summer said. “It’s all about what it looks like.” And according to Summer, the two are not even particularly close since the wedding. “We’re friends but not buddies,” she said. “I don’t think she would rely on me to take a bullet for her.”
There is one promise that is made to every bridesmaid to compensate for the particular humiliation she is forced to endure, whether it is having a baby blue tutu fitted to her hips or being asked to groove down the aisle to the beats of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” an idea that will surely surface sooner or later.
No, it is not the reassurance that you will one day be able to look back at the experience fondly, laughing at your outfit and remarking on how catchy that tune really was. We are expected to take comfort in the fact that we can inflict similar suffering on our own bridesmaids.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and in the world of weddings, it comes with a side of frosty attendants. Complain about your bridesmaid duties, and another woman will undoubtedly point out that you can inflict the same thing as payback when your special day comes. The idea of exacting retribution on female friends is troubling on many levels, and we’d probably be better off just to stage a cage match at the altar and end the cycle of violence right there.
Some women profess more pure motivations for standing up beside a betrothed friend. When Faye S. got married, her friend was Super Bridesmaid, her utility belt well stocked with Advil, Pepto-Bismol, hairpins, tampons, and extra pantyhose. She threw parties and organized bands, kept the ring bearer on his Ritalin, and thawed out The Bride’s cold feet. So when it was Faye’s turn to be a bridesmaid in her friend’s wedding, she felt she owed it to her to perform similarly, even though she lacked the genetic predisposition for creating bridal shower loot bags.
“I wanted to be as good a bridesmaid as she was,” said Faye. “I just wasn’t cut out for it.”
Other women are motivated by neither revenge nor gratitude, but simply the pursuit of good karma. They are trying to score brownie points for their own weddings among their family and friends and the larger powers-that-be.
Brooke B. and her friend Kelli F., who faked an illness to escape the reception of a bride they did not really like, were even warned by their parents: “Do not be in this wedding. She’s not your friend.”
The Bride was rude to them throughout the engagement period, and did not thank them for a shower they threw in her honor. When the wedding party gifts were handed out, the women watched as the groomsmen opened cuff links, silk ties, and cigars, and they were each handed a grocery bag filled with a single
Cosmopolitan
magazine, a lip gloss, and a package of facial wipes. Still, the women swallowed their pride and focused on how they would benefit when their own weddings came around. Kelli was getting married the following year, and they decided that they had to cooperate as bridesmaids so she would have stories to leverage against her own attendants.
“We did it to protect ourselves,” Brooke said. “But since then, all we did was talk shit about it. So that might cancel it out.”
No one starts off as a Bad Bridesmaid. It’s like an allergic reaction that develops with age, bred in a culture that has turned weddings into large-scale productions with no margin of error and has made a generation of women highly sensitive to ugly dresses and passive-aggressive bitchiness. Still, before our first time leading someone down the aisle, most women look forward to the
opportunity to stand on the front lines, a roomful of people admiring their pastel posse, a place of honor reserved at the head table, and their legacy ensured in the wedding photo album and commemorative DVD.
Giselle W., who considered suing her former friend after being dismissed from a wedding party, still remembers how excited she was when she was first asked to be a bridesmaid, at age twelve. “I was one of fifteen bridesmaids for my cousin, and I was so excited,” she said. “I felt like I was royalty.”
So why is it that so many bridesmaids end up feeling less like princesses and more like prisoners of war? No one wants to be the one disappointing element of a perfect wedding, and most women facing bridal party pressure do their best to at least play along, even if they don’t like the rules.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason for women becoming the Bad Bridesmaids of the world, loudly questioning the need for another shower or laughing hysterically when the ceremonial dove flies into an electrical line. Some women butt their beautiful heads with sisters and best friends, others with distant acquaintances or former colleagues. A few bridal disasters are born of lingering resentment, others explode out of a single slight or sequence of events. All of the brides who make their attendants feel Bad do have one thing in common, though: they see their bridesmaids as wedding accessories instead of friends, if only for a moment.
Paula J., a woman who has been a bridesmaid six times with varying levels of posttraumatic stress, said the best brides are the ones who are less concerned with the details.
“They don’t care if your shoes all match, they don’t care if your speech is two minutes or ten minutes, they don’t care what
time you get there,” she said. Being asked to be a bridesmaid in those cases, Paula remembers, is about having fun together and celebrating something bigger than both of you, and the resulting euphoria brings out the best in even the worst Former Bridesmaids. “You actually want to do things for them then,” she said. “You think it would actually be nice to buy her a drink or whatever, because you’re doing things on your own initiative and not because she told you to do it.”
Another woman battled through being Bad by refusing to back down to her friend’s demands and pointing out when her bride was being unreasonable, advice she viewed as her duty as a lifelong friend.
“I wouldn’t stand up for her if I didn’t support her and if I didn’t believe she was marrying a really nice guy who was crazy about her,” said Madison K. “We’ve been friends since the fifth grade. If I can’t tell her that her ideas totally suck, and use those words, our friendship wouldn’t have lasted that long.”
Barbara M. has been a bridesmaid more than fifteen times, beginning with a sorority-sister bride in 1995. Since then, she has stood up for friends, sisters, cousins, and in-laws, and her only complaint has been the quality of the dresses, one of which was robin’s-egg blue and another that had a “big old bow” stapled to the butt.
Besides those unfortunate clothing choices, she said, all of her bridesmaid experiences have been good ones, and have taken her to such beautiful destinations as Aspen, Belize, and the Cayman Islands.
“Nothing’s gone wrong,” she said. “I don’t know why, because you always hear horror stories.”
Barbara cannot explain how she has managed to escape unscathed when so many women have lost friends and financial independence as a result of just one wedding. The saying “Thrice a bridesmaid, never a bride” was born of the belief that bridesmaids absorbed evil curses directed at the bride during weddings, and would eventually be damaged beyond repair. If this is true, maybe Barbara has been permanently damaged by her bridesmaid duties, suffering early-onset dementia that prevents her from recalling the traumatic incidents of her past. She prefers to believe that her happy experiences are credited to the fact that she has no “bridezilla” friends, and that all of the women she stood up for were unusually low maintenance. With fifteen weddings, though, she has probably lost one whole year of her life attending showers, bachelorettes, and loan-approval meetings at her local bank branch. So has she ever considered saying no—not out of fear but simply to avoid the cost and time commitments?
“No. Not ever an option,” she protests innocently. “Have people done that?”
Sarah G. did not say no when she was asked to be a bridesmaid for a woman she and her boyfriend met on vacation in Mexico. Recall that she endured awkward showers knowing no one, bought an expensive dress, and even let the groom-to-be crash at her new house before the whole ordeal was over.
She drove home from that wedding, threw her ugly dress directly in the garbage, and sat on the couch like a zombie until dawn, when her parents woke up and asked her what was wrong.
“I just had the worst night of my life,” she remembers telling them.
She spent more than $ 1,000 on the wedding, including $200 on the dress, $150 for the bachelorette, $100 for the shower gift, and $150 for the wedding gift. In retrospect, she realizes she should have said no, explaining that she and her boyfriend had just bought a house and could not afford—mentally or financially—to be involved.
Instead, after the dust cleared, Sarah and her boyfriend broke up and sold their house. The couple who had put so much strain on their relationship divorced less than a year after their wedding, and Sarah lost touch with The Bride until recently.
Suddenly the woman began calling her again, trying to rekindle the friendship, and sending Sarah into panic mode. The battered bridesmaid admits she is now avoiding The Bride, not because of the past, but because of what could happen in the future.
“What if she gets married again?” Sarah asked. “I can’t be anywhere near that.”
If Sarah’s is not enough of a cautionary tale, listen to the experts. Wedding planner and bridal boutique owner Deb McCoy thinks nuptial preparations have gotten so out of control that it’s hard to see what really matters.
“We have to get back to the basic perception of the wedding as a family and friend affair, where the bride and groom take their guests into consideration before they take themselves into consideration,” she said. “If you do that, people will walk out saying, ‘Wow, what a wonderful party.’”
Then again, not everyone is convinced this can happen. Cele Otnes, author of
Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish
Wedding,
says it’s unlikely that women will walk away from having the wedding of their dreams, no matter what the repercussions on their real-life relationships. There were times in history, she said, when weddings became less elaborate for a period, going “back into the parlor,” so to speak. This happened, she pointed out, only when society was experiencing widespread strife, like an economic downturn or maybe an international conflict.
“I don’t know what would make it go down unless we go into a world war,” she said. “There are just too many players involved.”
Deciding between nuclear annihilation and a bad bridesmaid dress will be a tough call for a lot of women, but Otnes does not see a third option. Asking for weddings to become less manic affairs is like wishing tuition fees would drop to triple digits—it’s just not going to happen.
“There are sometimes these little pockets of resistance, where women advocate for wearing their mother’s wedding dress,” she said. “I think we may have passed the point of no return, and it would take an awful lot to go back.”