Bad Bridesmaid

by Siri Agrell

  “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.”

  The Honeymoon’s Over

  Carrie: How do you tell somebody you don’t want to be a part of their wedding?

  Miranda: If I knew that, I wouldn’t be in charge of the guest book. Sex and the City

  It 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.

  Case Dismissed

  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:

  JURY OUT IN BRIDESMAID V. BRIDE

  WEDDING INDUSTRY SUFFERS MAJOR THIRD-QUARTER LOSS AS ENGAGED COUPLES ANXIOUSLY AWAIT COURT RULING

  Always the bridesmaid? That could mean a huge payoff for some women, as a court deliberates on the responsibilities of brides toward their disgruntled former wedding attendants.

  A jury of seven men and six women (three of whom are former bridesmaids) has been sequestered since yesterday afternoon, tasked with deciding whether bridesmaids deserve financial compensation for their wedding-related duties. In anticipation of the controversial ruling, a group of women in hideous pastel-colored dresses has gathered in front of the courthouse, threatening to riot if the court rules in favor of brides. The case, which stretched on over months like a typical engagement period and called more than 200 witnesses, saw a cranberry bridesmaid dress entered as evidence under Exhibit A, for atrocious.

  Security presence throughout the city has been beefed up in anticipation of the ruling, and weddings throughout the country have reached an all-time low as bridesmaids withhold their services in solidarity with the plaintiff. Vera Wang could not be reached for comment.

  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?”

  Repeat Offenders

  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.

  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.”

  Instant Bad Karma

  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.