Bridezilla Season
Planning a wedding should come with a mental health warning for women. The longing for fairytale perfection is so hard-wired into us, there’s a real risk a wedding can either unleash our inner Jordan – cue a dress that needs its own parking space – or turn us into a tantrum-prone Bridezilla.
Since women have never been able to learn from each another’s mistakes, we continue to take the wedding day seriously. For all the wrong reasons. I have met women with every detail mapped out, right down to the buttonholes, without so much as a boyfriend let alone a husband-to-be on the horizon. In any other circumstances, exhaustive planning for an event which may or may not happen sometime in the future would be counted as delusional behaviour. With weddings it’s tolerated.
No matter how successful or high-powered a woman may be, how pragmatic or sane, her wedding day brings out the attention-seeking little girl in her. Irrespective of age or situation, she burns to be the envy of every other woman. And in the chemical imbalance that defines the bridal state, she believes a dress shrieking money is the best way to achieve her goal. Quite simply, today’s bride wants everyone to gape at her extravagance.
For a frightening number of women, the culmination of their dreams is focused on this single day. You can’t help wondering what they’ll do for a life afterwards. It’s all so Jane Austen; except the point about Jane Austen is it’s entertainment, not a blueprint for living. Besides, the setting was 200 years ago – has nothing changed? Are revised inheritance laws, the vote, equal pay (in theory), burning our bras and buying new ones with extra padding while we debate silicone implants meaningless in the face of a floaty white gown? With maybe a lovely sparkly tiara to top it off?
Apparently so, if the feeding frenzy surrounding a bankruptcy sale of bridal stock in Cork this week is anything to judge by. Hundreds of brides queued patiently for staggered admission to a small room where they were unable to fit on the merchandise or claim a refund. All that, on the off-chance they might find the perfect dress.
The dress is the essential prop that will transform a woman into a princess, the role she has convinced herself she should play on her wedding day. (Notice how it’s always her wedding day, never ours.) Did I say princess? Make that goddess; let’s not sell ourselves short. Never mind that a woman may have spent the previous decade establishing her independence, defining herself via her career – on her wedding day nostalgia reigns. She yearns to look feminine.
She wants to be given in marriage by a male relative, creakingly paternalistic though the convention is, and to replicate the demure, veiled image of her mother and grandmother, even if she shudders at the thought of a life like theirs. It’s all right, it’s tradition. And while women have struggled against tradition for the past century, it’s back to custom and practice on the wedding day. Custom and practice with a twist, however. Women’s expectations have ratcheted up and they feel entitled to be transfigured on their wedding day, irrespective of the raw material. Once it was enough to go on a bit of a diet in advance, now they want liposuction and botox and a Vera Wang dress for at least 10,000 euro. They want to look unrecognisable, which is surely verging on the counter-productive. The frock to dazzle all frocks is yet another manifestation of our sudden wealth and concurrent tackiness: a designer number for five figures is a status symbol, something off-the-peg is selling yourself short. Men buy sports cars, women opt for wedding dresses, although they’d need to leave the wedding albums on show for the rest of their lives to get their money’s worth. Today’s bride wants all her friends to sigh: ‘’She went way over the top but she can afford it.’’ It would be more honest to wear a simple shift with cash pinned to every square inch of the material. ‘’Look at me, I’m loaded!’’
I am struck by how many apparently intelligent brides invest every atom of energy, effort and emotion in just one day, as though a flawless wedding can guarantee a perfect marriage … or even validate the relationship. How many of those painstakingly orchestrated weddings will end in court? We may have a low divorce rate compared with other EU countries at 16 per cent, but the figure is rising. Weddings don’t seem to bring out the Groomzilla in men, possibly because they don’t have it in them to suffer panic attacks about how many tiers of cake to order or whether the invitations should be lettered in silver typeface. Or perhaps it’s because they retain that sense of proportion which women lose the moment an engagement ring is on their finger.
One woman of my acquaintance rushed out in a frenzy to buy a replacement dress three days before her wedding, after she attended a friend’s nuptials and saw the bride in a similar – not identical – outfit. It took a year for her credit card to recover. I have lost count of the women with innate taste and discernment who had a rush of blood to the head and opted for a circus tent masquerading as a dress. Some women choose their bridesmaids on the basis of looks (too pretty and they might be outshone, too plain and they could detract from the bridal party). Others alienate their entire families as hysteria grips in the prelude to a wedding. I have known brides so busy smiling for the camera that they forgot to smile at their guests, or even pay attention to them. I remember the naked fury of the bride whose sister announced her engagement at the wedding meal – stealing her limelight, as she saw it.
Judgment, perspective and a sense of humour are washed away in a sea of tulle as soon as the date is set. The least excusable aspect to bridal meltdown is that it’s a tyranny women have foisted on themselves. Men aren’t the ones telling us we must do a Barbie on our wedding day. We’ve made our own decision that we don’t want to look happy in the photographs, we’d prefer to look thin, tanned, groomed, glossy – and stressed out.
We women are our own worst enemies. We are already self-critical because we don’t have size six bodies (eight is considered on the curvy side now) with a huge bust, even though the only way to be simultaneously whippet-thin and bosomy is to starve and have silicone implants. We have an inferiority complex if we aren’t holding down a demanding job while baking cakes and sewing our own clothes. We think we should be superwoman because that’s what equality has been distorted to mean to us.
And superwoman wants to wear the ultimate glamorous wedding dress – because everything, from advertising to social conditioning, tells her she’s worth it.
