Nuptials (GW!)

An Essay In Which Oline,
A Member of the Bridal Party,
Walks the Fine Line of Being Witty
and Alienating All Her Recently Wed Friends

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s hard to be in the wedding party. But it’s surprisingly easy to complain about it. This is a time-honored tradition, particularly among impoverished but rocking post-collegiate, pre-professional twenty-somethings. There’s bitching about the cost of bridesmaids dresses, laments about having to purchase overpriced, giftwrapped flatware, musings of Are we really such good friends?, and, of course, recollections of wedding parties past.

There are certain givens that we must establish. You love the friends who are getting married. You love that they are in love and that they are formalizing that love and you love that they love you so much that they want to include you in that love. You also love celebrating their love by loving them enough to stand beside them as they profess that love to a room full of other people who similarly love that they are in love.

That said, you, Mr./Miss./Mrs. Post-Collegiate, Pre-Professional Twenty-Something, have probably participated in a wedding in some way. Maybe you were the bride, a bridesmaid, a groomsman, or that lucky lesser-tier friend who guarded the guest book. Maybe you just put the presents in the car or caught the bouquet, but you got a sense of the madness. You rehearsed and you ate the cake.

Being in a wedding is 97.2% love, which is a very beautiful thing. But that remaining 2.8% is what I can only describe as “Eh.” That nonplussed sound made with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders and a quick tilt of the head. This Eh Factor has nothing to do with the profuse love that you feel for the loving couple. It is simply an inherent aspect of the wedding party condition.

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve been a flower girl, a junior bridesmaid, a bridesmaid, and a maid of honor. I’ve been in five weddings and attended twelve more. I’ve worn tulle, velvet, satin, and polyester. Carried roses, carnations, and cinnamon sticks. My hair has been cornrowed, curled, and braided (so tightly my eyebrows hurt for days). I’ve held the petticoats of peeing brides and worn bras and shoes that would have made Stalin shudder in fear. Considering all of this, I’m only moderately bitter.

It’s hard not to have mixed feelings. On the one hand, you’re thrilled to be there, to support a beloved friend by standing beside him or her as he or she makes this bold public commitment to his or her eternal love. You wouldn’t want to not be there. But in many ways, being there kind of sucks (And in writing that, I’m feeling very like Truman Capote as he scribbled away on Answered Prayers). It sucks for a variety of reasons that have absolutely nothing to with the friends involved.

I attribute this suckiness, in part, to media portrayals of weddings (having no experience as a groomsman or a bride or groom, I must couch this exclusively in the maiden experience). They are unfailingly horrid. The dresses are appalling, the hair gruesome, the wedding drama scary. Someone always makes A Scene (Sixteen Candles). There’s always some disaster (Father of the Bride). If you’re a singleton, there’s a weird pressure to find your soulmate among the guests, or at the very least, someone to take home for meaningless sex (Wedding Crashers). Even at the most beautiful weddings, horrifying things inevitably happen (Charlotte’s gorgeous weddings on Sex & the City weren’t exactly a fun time for anyone involved).

Depending on your viewpoint, the media have either lowered our nuptial expectations by making weddings little more than run-of-the-mill slapstick comedies or heightened them by grossly exaggerating the juxtaposition between fairy tale glamour and human falibility.

From either standpoint, any wedding can be torture. The bridesmaid’s dress may not be that bad in reality, but it’s not what you would have picked, so it’s inevitably all wrong for your skin tone, body type or bosom. The hair might be bearable, but it’s been dictated according to someone else’s whims, and why the hell should it have to be coordinated, anyway? On top of that, the shoes usually don’t fit and the unfilled bustline is billowing in the wind. Aside from clothing drama, more often than not, there’s also some family tension, whether from divorced parents, overbearing mothers, insulting grandmothers, or photograph-happy uncles. Add to that the media-inspired colassal chance that some unforseen, unpreventable disaster will unfold, and it’s a wonder everyone doesn’t elope. I would.

Being a member of the Wedding Party is the adult equivalent of a prom, albeit with considerably more gravitas. There’s usually some “let’s get our nails done” business and dressing up and dancing and limos. But it comes down to the cold, hard fact that, despite all of its trappings, a wedding is not the prom—and therein lies the problem.

In preparing for any other event it would be entirely unfathomable that someone else should have the power to determine your dress and shoes and hair and make-up and nail polish and jewelry. For example, it is downright unjust for a bride to force you into a gown from the unfashionable Chadwick’s catalogue. You wouldn’t wear anything from Chadwick’s to prom. Your mom wouldn’t wear anything from Chadwick’s anywhere after 1993. But this is not your time. You are not the center of attention and if The Center of Attention demands that you wear dyed-to-match shoes and tease your bangs, there are no alternatives.

The recent disparagment of “criers” has only upped the wedding party pressures. It has become a sign of embarrassing weakness for members of the wedding party to display emotion during the ceremony. It used to be that bridesmaids hovered in the chapel entryway and solemnly uttered their final words: “God. I hope I don’t fall.” Now they pray they won’t cry. Kleenex are stuffed into bouquets or wrapped around stems or stuck in shoes. I have mentally done multiplication tables while watching some of my best friends walk down the aisle. It’s the only way to keep from blubbering, and blubbering would be very bad. A former youth minister of mine had a legendary wedding video in which he and his wife sobbed while exchanging their vows and a bead of snot dangled from his nose for a solid minute and a half. And we bridesmaids can’t be having that.

We’re special, the ladies of the lady of the day. The humble plebs, those standard invited guests who got to pick their own clothes, pay a high price. They have to fight for a good seat, elbow their way through the buffet, and wait in line to speak to the bride and groom. A bridesmaid need simply rise from the chair and her effect upon the crowd is like Moses parting the waters. She is allowed to the fore of every line. Glasses of champagne appear out of nowhere. She has unlimited access to the bride. Ah! The magical powers of a $120 formal gown.

And the whole thing is magical. Unfortunately, that’s what we tend to forget amdist the drama and the mix of emotions. No one wants to admit that they resent the bride because of the expense, or their own loneliness, or any other reason that is within human nature to resent a joyous occasion. But to some extent we members of the wedding party all have. The media have only intensified these feelings by exploiting the conflict between selflessness and envy to endow bridesmaids with a certain sense of entitlement. Somewhere along the line, being in the wedding party went from being an honor to an imposition. Which is sad, because if you spend the whole time stewing about the cost of the dress, then you miss the magic of the moment.

Last weekend I wore one such swanky gown and stood behind one of my dearest friends as she took on a hyphen and her new husband’s last name. I slipped the ring, secured by a ponytail holder, off my finger and laid it on the open Bible, my usual bordello red nails glimmering in the sunlight filtering through the stained glass. The dress didn’t quite fit and my hair had some flyaways, but I’ve never felt more honored to be anywhere in my life. And that’s exactly as it should be.