I have failed at being a bride

My sister is getting married this year and I am her maid of honour. She is a braver woman than I.

When she asked me I said yes immediately because she’s my little sister and I love her and obviously I want to be there for her. But I did warn her. I told her my uses would probably peak at “oh yes, that’s nice” and “it cost HOW much?” That I would spend the run up to the big day having stress dreams about standing in front of her guests forgetting my own name, let alone being able to form a coherent speech about how lovely she is. She said yes anyway. As I said, she is a braver woman than I.

When it comes to planning, my sister is Type A. She is organised. She knows what ‘favours’ are and why we need them. She sends me links to bridesmaid dresses and asks for my opinion, which feels like a lot of pressure for someone who wears the same jumper for 4 days in a row.

I am, you may have guessed, Type B. Type “I’ll get round to it”. Type “it’s on my list” except it’s not because I’m Type B and we don’t make lists. Type “is that this weekend?” Type “I’ve been engaged for nearly 4 years and could not tell you a single concrete detail about our wedding except that it will probably involve me and my partner” (though if we could both not be there we probably wouldn’t be).

I don’t have a Pinterest board. I don’t have a vision. I don’t even have a vague sense of a season. Summer? Winter? 2027? Your guess is as good as mine. My most detailed wedding plan is quite simply - “not that.” Not the stress, not the spreadsheets, not the standing up in front of people I’m supposed to know enough about to seat strategically, and DEFINITELY not the £28,610 average UK couples spend on what is essentially 6 hours and a photoshoot.

Watching people in my life plan their Big Day while I realise I’m temperamentally unsuited to my own has taught me what I have long suspected - we’ve completely lost the plot about weddings.

Behind all the carousels of golden hour photos and lace table settings it seems most people planning a wedding are having a pretty miserable time.

The initial “we’re engaged!” excited energy lasts approximately 3 weeks before it morphs into “okay but why the fuck are napkins so expensive?” and “my future MIL has opinions about literally everything” and “if one more person asks me if they can bring a +1 I have literally never met I am going to pull a Katie Prices boyfriend and fake my own kidnap”.

I started wondering if it was just the people I know - maybe we’re all just catastrophically bad at this (not my sis mind, she’s great at this!) - so I went looking for some stats. And it turns out that no, most people planning a wedding really are having a terrible time.

84% of brides report feeling stressed ahead of and during their wedding day. More than a quarter say it’s the most stressful event of their entire lives. Personally I'd rank trying to get your child into a car seat while they're lying face down on the driveway screaming about how they wanted to open the door themselves up there but, whatever.

Nearly half of couples - 49% - say their biggest source of stress is “making sure it was perfect”. And more than a third of those same people - 37% - later regret spending so much time worrying about it. They look back on their average nearly 30K spend (*eye twitch*) and think “why did we do that to ourselves?”

So why are we doing this to ourselves?

I think for many it comes down to the need to be seen to be doing it properly. And by properly I mean - will it make the girls from school who never liked you jealous?

“Seen” used to mean something much smaller than it does now. The performance element of weddings feels like it’s on steroids these days. Of course weddings have been performances for as long as there have been weddings - it’s just that they were originally performances for the people on the guest list. The concept of a wedding as a full scale production isn’t some new phenomenon caused by Instagram. Long before the social media ghouls arrived to turn brides into their own content cronies Hollywood had already figured out that weddings make excellent viewing because everyone becomes completely unhinged when there are flowers, family politics and a ridiculous amount of money involved.

Father of the Bride is essentially 90 minutes of Steve Martin losing his mind over the guest list going through an actual physical contact book working out who can be cut (“He died? That’s great!”) before finally unravelling entirely over the fact that hot dogs come in packs of 10 and buns come in packs of 8 (an injustice he cannot let go of, ever, at any point, for the rest of the film). Franck the wedding planner with the unplaceable accent is a man who agrees the day should be “not too fancy” while simultaneously booking 3 live swans. He spends the whole film finding new ways to make George Banks’s bill bigger while George’s family adore him for it.

Fast forward a few years to My Best Friend’s Wedding and we’ve got Kimmy Wallace (aka 90s Cameron Diaz) getting married while being outrageously, offensively wealthy. Her dad owns the Chicago White Sox, there’s a mansion, enough flowers to trigger hay fever from several postcodes away and a guest whose tongue is stuck to an icy cock belonging to an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David. As you do.

Julia Roberts’ character Jules (who is supposed to be the ‘normal’ one in all of this madness despite the fact that she is trying to steal the groom) spends most of the film wandering around looking faintly bewildered by the whole thing.

In the 90s these weddings were funny precisely because they were ridiculous. They were the kind of weddings most people watched from the sofa thinking “imagine spending that much on a wedding” before going back to their buffet at the local golf club and a DJ called Kev who also did children's parties.

The extravagance was part of the fantasy - it was something we watched rich fictional families do on screen - not something we expected every ordinary person to recreate on a nurse’s salary. The performance had an audience yes, but it was a contained one - the people attending.

Someone might go home and talk about the dress, someone's aunt might have opinions about the flowers, the VHS might come out at Christmas and everyone would cringe at Uncle Dave doing the Macarena with his tie round his head. But when the guests went home the performance was over.

What’s different now is that the performance we put on isn’t simply for the guests anymore and increasingly, gathering content isn’t just a byproduct of the day but almost the entire point.

I was scrolling TikTok last year - procrastinating, as one does - when I got served a video of Grace Beverly on her wedding day. For those unfamiliar, Grace Beverly is the founder of Tala (activewear brand), has about a million Instagram followers, and is generally quite successful at being beautiful and aspirational for a living (I jest, she is pretty successful at being a businesswoman too).

Anyway, there she was on her wedding day, stood in her wedding dress, lip syncing to a TikTok sound. Cut to her husband in his suit, lip syncing his bit. Back and forth they went. Grace. Husband. Grace. Husband. Until finally they were both stood posing against golden hour sunshine at their French chateau looking like they’d been lit by god himself.

She’d captioned it something about managing to get her husband to do his first ever lip sync on their wedding day like this was some adorable milestone rather than a completely bizarre thing to be doing while you’re supposed to be, you know, getting married.

Naturally I went to her page because I’m nosy and have the self control of a toddler near the biscuit cupboard. There were videos of her and her mates in bed the morning before lip syncing to Mamma Mia. Her floating down some stairs like an ethereal goddess while her friends bounced around on balconies above her like they’d been choreographed by someone who’d watched too much Mamma Mia. Four more locations around the chateau, everyone lip syncing to Get Me To The Church On Time.

Then there was all the standard wedding content we’ve come to expect - bridesmaids crying on cue while fixing her veil, her filming herself in her dress having her “moment she’s dreamed of since she was a little girl”, montages of dress fittings, all soundtracked by Lana Del Rey and the poet with the lovely voice that just makes you feel safe when you hear her - Josie Balka.

One caption read;

“Ok so my drafts are the fullest they’ve ever been, let’s start at the beginning.”

There was more!

All filmed on her wedding day, which means she spent part of the day actually getting married and part of it setting her phone up - multiple times - doing takes, making sure everyone was in sync, checking the lighting was right, the angles worked, the backdrop looked good. Her brain split between experiencing the thing and documenting the thing.

But Grace Beverly is a millionaire Jennie, she’s not exactly Everywoman is she. No - not in the sense that most of us aren’t getting married over 3 days across two French estates that have never hosted weddings before in custom Kate Halfpenny gowns, dripping in Boodles, with a converted barn afterparty and a pool day the next day with branded towels because “you can’t ask your guests to fly to the South of France and not take them to a beach club.” But in the sense that everyone’s a content creator now? Absolutely she is.

There are videos all over your timeline just like these.

We’ve all got camera rolls bursting with things we haven’t posted yet, captions we’re mentally drafting in the shower, or conversations we've half stopped listening to because we've suddenly thought, this would make a good reel.

And weddings, it appears, have become the biggest performance of all.

There’s the engagement announcement, ring angled to catch the light, 47 takes and counting. The venue reveal, captioned like you’ve discovered Narnia rather than paid a deposit on a barn where you have to bring your own cutlery. The dress shopping content. The hen do carousel. The countdown posts, each one recycling a photo from the £500 engagement shoot where you laughed at a hedge for three hours.

There’s the getting ready reel complete with dressing gown and prosecco you’re not drinking because it’s 9am and you’re already freaking the fuck out. The choreographed bridesmaid reveal, and now, God help us, the choreographed entrance dance - because just walking into your own reception is no longer sufficient. (Please, someone extract my eyes with a spoon. I watched one the other week that was a bunch of blokes who might as well have been Neil, Simon, Will and Jay from The Inbetweeners, going full Papa Americano in what looked like Chatham. It haunts me).

Then the “we did it!” post, followed by the professional photos and wedding film, released in careful instalments over the next 12 months and then every year after that. A wedding isn’t just an event for you and your loved ones - it’s a whole content schedule (which is probably a good thing given how much you’ve spent on it. Bang for your buck and all that!) And every single decision - the flowers, the venue, the dress, the sodding napkins - gets filtered through how it’ll look when you post it.

Which is, I think, the only way to explain this comment I saw on threads the other day:

As someone who is 33 and in her fourth year of being engaged, it appears this person may consider me the bridal equivalent of gone off milk. By the time I actually get round to booking a registrar I’ll be collecting my pension in one hand and my order of service in the other. I won’t be walking down the aisle so much as being wheeled down it. The “do you take this man” moment will need to be said slowly, and directly into my good ear, and my “something old” will just be… ahem, me.

Oh, what an embarrassing state of affairs. 33 and practically compost.

If I were to put aside the fact that this was clearly written by someone who has never heard of B*Witched, and have a go at working out what exactly is meant to be so embarrassing here, I’d hazard a guess it’s got something to do with the performance we’ve turned weddings into.

Embarrassment is a funny emotion because it only really exists in relation to other people. You don’t tend to feel embarrassed because you’ve done something objectively wrong. You feel embarrassed because of an audience - an audience seeing you do something embarrassing. Without an audience (real of imagined) there can be no embarrassment. Embarrassment is what happens when you become painfully aware of what other people might think.

To say being a 30+ year old bride is embarrassing only really makes sense if being a bride has stopped meaning “a woman who's getting married” and started meaning something else - a character, almost. Someone performing “bride” to an audience of onlookers. Onlookers who will judge you and the show you put on.

And as I sit here writing this all I can think is - excuse me while I opt the fuck out.

When I was little I had a costume wedding dress. I'd parade around the house in it marrying whichever boy from school I happened to fancy that week.

Like most little girls, I had a very clear idea of how my life would go. I’d meet someone, get engaged, get married, buy a house, have children - all in that order. Nobody ever sat me down and explicitly told me that was how it had to happen but it was the story everything I saw seemed to tell - wedding first, life afterwards. The wedding was the beginning of the happy ending.

Ageing, far from being embarrassing, meant learning who I actually am - what I’m good at, and what I’m spectacularly shit at. What brings me joy and what makes me want to crawl into a hole and never emerge. And it turns out I am not cut out for Big Wedding Energy. Not one little bit.

I’ve come to understand that for me to plan and execute a traditional wedding would guarantee a relationship breakdown before we even made it down the aisle.

I’m terrible at being the centre of attention for longer than about four minutes. I’m terrible at managing other people’s expectations while also having my own. I couldn’t give less of a shit about napkin colours or whether the flowers coordinate with anything. And I am catastrophically bad at trying to keep a hundred people happy simultaneously while also attempting to enjoy myself - which, as we established earlier, is a moot point anyway, since I couldn’t invite a hundred people without including my entire street, the staff at my son’s nursery, and that woman from the Post Office!

As with all of life’s best laid plans, the order in which I did things went wonky.

I met the man I’ll marry on a Tinder date in which we got paralytic drunk. We liked each other enough to date for some months before moving in together. We bought a house. We got pregnant. We got engaged. We had a baby. And 4 years later we’re still engaged because life life’d and it’s just not been a priority.

25 year old me may well have been horrified by that - but 25 year old me didn’t know 33 year old me.

33 year old me couldn’t give less of a shit.

Maybe that’s because becoming a parent has a remarkable way of stripping away your capacity to care about things that don’t really matter. Once you’ve breastfed a child in the middle of a café and caught their sick in your bare hands and slept body to body with them for over 3 years despite what other people think, the idea that somebody might decide your wedding is too small, too simple, too late, or too “embarrassing” starts to lose its sting. So too does the urge to perform it all perfectly. The older I've got, the less interested I've become in making my life look right to people who aren't living it.

When I picture my wedding now, I don’t picture the things I used to. I picture my son. A son who wouldn’t have been in attendance had we married before I was 30. The most important person in our lives would have existed only as a figment of our imagination. A vague hypothetical we’d talk about having “one day.” We talk endlessly about child free weddings, about whether children spoil the atmosphere, whether they belong there at all - and of course everyone should have whatever wedding they want. But for me there’s something incredibly lovely about the fact that our little boy will get to be there when we eventually tie the knot to cement a life lived mostly off camera.

A wedding isn’t a big show to kick off the beginning of something for us. It’s just confirmation of something that’s already there, load bearing and very much lived in.

If that makes me an embarrassing 30+ bride then I suppose I’ll just have to live with the shame.

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