Bad Bridesmaid

by Siri Agrell

  “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.”

  As Good as It Gets

  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?”

  The Mourning After

  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.”

  Judith Martin, author of the syndicated “Miss Manners” column, receives so many letters from bridesmaids
asking her about their recourse that she joked about founding a “labor union for bridesmaids to ensure them decent working conditions, proper uniforms and limited financial liability.”

  This is actually not a bad idea. Brides get prenups, hotels get damage deposits, and even the mentally ill get some nice soothing medication. Yes, bridesmaids get the earrings or the bracelet, and they’re lovely—thank you. But while the bride and groom head off on their honeymoon (paid for, no doubt, through a bridesmaid-organized shower), the bridesmaids go back to being slightly less financially secure versions of themselves, with one more outfit they won’t wear and the beginnings of a serious alcohol-dependency problem.

  We are not asking for a lot in exchange, just a little respect. We want more than a toast from the groom’s less attractive brother; we want to stop being the whipping girls of weddings and the butt of jokes penned by Hollywood screenwriters who use the bridesmaid as shorthand for desperate spinster or psycho singleton.

  When a wedding is complete, few people sit back and say, “She made a beautiful bridesmaid,” or flip through the wedding album cooing over shots of the bridal party. No one adds “bridesmaid” to their resume under “Education and Experience” or wears a special piece of jewelry to indicate their acceptance into the Bridesmaid Fold. But imagine if they did. Who knows, maybe The New York Times Vows section would start giving as much ink to the qualifications of the attendants as they do the betrothed:

  Jessica Hardy, Melissa McNamara, and Elise Campbell yesterday stood up for their good friend Monica Richard, who was married at the Lake Serenity Country Club.

  The bridesmaids wore $300 pink taffeta dresses that made them look “hippy,” and carried bouquets of calla lilies, to which McNamara had an allergic reaction.

  Hardy, 27, has known The Bride since childhood. The two grew up together in the suburbs of Connecticut and swore to be friends forever. Hardy is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Hardy, who were not invited to the ceremony because The Bride’s father finds them tiresome.

  McNamara, 28, met The Bride when they both attended Vassar College. A political strategist in Washington, D.C., she graduated magna cum laude and saw her dissertation published in the journal Foreign Affairs. At the wedding reception, guests repeatedly asked if she was “next.”

  Campbell, 27, went to camp with The Bride 12 years ago and has since kept in touch via the occasional letter. She once visited the bride at college but found the weekend awkward and tedious. Throughout the ceremony she mentally calculated the money she had spent on the occasion, and wished she had bought a ticket to Europe instead.

  The bridesmaids’ dresses will be burned.

  I Do-Over

  A happy bridesmaid makes a happy bride.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  It was not the first time I had found myself with a Bad reputation.

  And, as it was with my teenage rep, the designation was not entirely undeserved. But I had been asked to stand as a bridesmaid a second time that summer, in the wedding party of my best friend, and I was terrified that she, too, would kick me out after learning of my Bad behavior.

  Maybe I would be issued a lifetime ban, I worried, a Bridesmaid Red Card retiring me from professional play and forcing me back to the minor leagues of wedding attendance, where I would be greeted as just another tipsy guest and nothing more. I was unbondable as a bridesmaid now, a liability, a flight risk, and damaged goods.

  Thankfully, my best friend had laughed when I mustered up the nerve to describe to her my attendant shame. In the wisdom gained through years of friendship, she told me that my big mouth had once again landed me in trouble and that I should have seen the whole disaster coming a mile away. She noted that if she had wanted a bridesmaid who was helpful and attentive she would have made another choice from the start. It seems it was not news to her that my respect for tradition and ability to behave like an adult left something to be desired.

  I sighed with relief and silently vowed to be the Best Bridesmaid the world had ever seen.

  They say that opposites attract, but this is not the case when it comes to a successful union of bride and bridesmaid. I believe that things went smoothly in my best friends wedding because she was as stunned by the process as I was, amazed that she would be wearing white and dedicating her life to a single man. She, too, was shocked that a cake could have a three-digit price tag and that a venue must be booked fourteen months in advance. Each step toward the aisle was a novel form of entertainment for both of us, as odd and unexpected as if she had decided to join the circus. When it came to doing what was expected, she was something of a Bad Bride herself.

  It had been this way since the beginning. When she came home from a New Zealand vacation engaged, she and her fiance had listened to me blab on for an hour over drinks before they mentioned their own exciting news. She did her best to maintain her taste and tact throughout her engagement, which was—mercifully—just eight months long. She wanted to be married, not mired in wedding planning, and refused to drag the whole thing out. She was excited, yes, but wanted to throw the ultimate party—not a pristine event—and for her, this meant killer food, good music, and the rental of a large lakefront home where the bridal party, her siblings, and other friends could stay to prolong the festivities into the wee hours.

  As she prepared to get hitched in her own particular style, she accepted my contributions—however minimal—with grace and humor, even when I appeared at her engagement party with a gift-wrapped copy of The Meaning of Wife, a book that examines the misogyny and materialism of marriage. I was not scolded and told that feminism has no place at a wedding celebration. Instead, the bride and groom laughed, and guests took turns reading sections of the tome aloud as we stood around the bar.

  When we went dress shopping with her mother and the other bridesmaids, she was clear that she didn’t care what we wore, as long as we were happy and comfortable. She had our backs when we entered one bridal store and found rack after rack of awful dresses, their shiny fabrics glowing under the sallow lighting, their seams already showing signs of distress from the weekends of women who had reluctantly pulled them on. We gamely retired to the changing room and when we reemerged, the MOB did her best to be supportive, politely commenting on flattering aspects of our looks while diplomatically suggesting that perhaps hot pink floor-length was not the way to go. The Bride, however, was nowhere to be seen. I walked outside in my Vegas showgirl number and found her sitting on a bench, head in hands. “That place is horrible,” she said. “We’re leaving right now.”

  For her bachelorettc party we adopted what we were told was a French bridal tradition called enterrement de jeune fille—funeral of a young woman—placing photographs and mementoes of our friendship into a small casket another friend had found at a neighborhood Goth store. The Bride loved the tribute, and carried the black box under one arm as we bar-hopped and danced the night away, even proudly displaying it on the plastic tablecloth of a Chinese restaurant where we went for late-night greasy food to soak up all the booze.

  There were many pre-wedding events, but she went out of her way to make them unimposing and optional. She told me that I didn’t have to come to the linen party thrown in her honor, probably because she knew I would say something inappropriate about what she was going to do on her new seven-hundred-thread-count sheets.

  Because she maintained her perspective and her sense of humor about the endeavor, I actually found myself wanting to do more to help. I pored through books of poetry when she mentioned her desire to have a work of literature included in her ceremony, marveling at how sexually explicit Margaret Atwood could be and wondering if Tupac’s verse had ever been read aloud in a Protestant church. I transcribed Maya Angelou and memorized Shakespeare sonnets before she settled on “Dance Me to the End of Love” by Leonard Cohen, a perfect last-minute find.

  When my bridesmaid dress was finished, I rushed it home before she could have a change of heart, and was so determined to look halfway decent in
it that I even bought a pair of Spanx to wear underneath. The tiny tube of stretch material looked like a bandage you would be given for a sprained ankle or wrist, and I seriously doubted that I would be able to pull it over one foot, let alone the length of my body from chest to knee.

  As anyone who has had the misfortune to wear a pair of Spanx knows, putting the thing on is as traumatic—if not more so—as just letting it all hang out. The elasticized material is supposed to smooth out all your bumps, but that means you have to cram them in there first. I had imagined the Spanx molding my figure into an entirely different formation, that my thighs would be pushed backward into a Jennifer Lopez—like butt, my belly flattened in a nonsurgical tuck, and all excess flesh miraculously relocated to my chest. In the end, it didn’t make any difference at all. When the wedding day came, I looked exactly the same as I had without the full-body suction device, other than the fact that the Spanx peeked out from under my cocktail-length dress like a pair of ribbed beige leggings. But you can’t say I didn’t try.

  This is not to say there weren’t moments when I silently cursed my luck or marveled at the things that can trip a girl up on her way down the aisle.

  On the beautiful September afternoon before the wedding, I made my way out of town for the rehearsal dinner, only to find myself stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Somehow, a man had managed to drive his car underneath a tractor trailer, wedging it there and stopping traffic on four lanes of busy rush-hour highway.