Weddings often end of friendships
In the adult-childhood of my 20s, I was in every wedding. I was usually a bridesmaid, adjusting my shawls and cap sleeves over my worst tattoo (a decision of my adult-infancy, so, 18), awkwardly but earnestly to fulfil at least the visual requirements of my role in the same way I tried to adjust my own desires and expectations to meet those of my friends who were getting married.
Celebrating the beginning of one relationship can end another.
Weddings are the boot camp of friendship — not like “booty boot camp,” the bridal-party bonding workout, but like basic training, the separation of the weak and careless from the strong and capable.
As a bridesmaid, maid-ofhonour and MC, I did some stuff right.
I landed on a bottle of Veuve and champagne glasses from the registry as go-to gifts for the multiple showers. I offered to do things, send emails, make meaningful eye contact with out-of-pocket groomsmen, wrangle staff or just hiss threats as required.
But I still missed or misread one million social cues regarding what my friends wanted or needed from me and those failures of friendship, especially in the context of a wedding, stay with me like a fog.
It’s hard to do weddings right. Even as a guest, I often got it wrong. I attended an exfriend’s wedding as a plus-one when I had been, very specifically, not invited. And I was devastated when a friend didn’t invite me to her small wedding but did invite a mutual I thought I was on par with. I tried not to hurt feelings with my own tiny wedding by inviting exactly no one other than my husband’s parents and my own, but I also didn’t tell anyone I was getting married, which was a bad move.
I am, admittedly, perplexed by most weddings, which have expanded beyond their original, ritualistic utility into performance art, aided and abetted by social media (which has made it obvious how, in the end, most weddings are basically the same).
Lately, brides seem more emboldened to voluntell their friends to plan, attend and pay for a bouquet of weddingadjacent events. There are the multiple bridal showers (with games!), the compulsory prewedding spa days and the alcohol-soaked long weekends in Las Vegas — parties thrown more for half-interested Instagram followers than first-tier friends and usually perpetuating an already wack feminine script. Imagine if the grooms and ushers spent long weekends inside together, paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to have body hair and dead skin removed, instead of doing paintball and eating.
Relationships between women — at least, the best ones, the entwined, ensorcelling friendships that are high-stakes from the start — tend to bend and sometimes break when one of them upsets the perfect, sailing order of things. Weddings are so often a hothouse for everything that goes wrong in friend-groups composed of women, who didn’t grow up with marriage as their single objective, when one of them gets engaged, and then gets drunk — understandably — on the “wedding” of it all. The demands, of time and money and emotional labour, on friends during wedding season transmogrifies friendship, and maybe the wedding itself, into a source of resentment.
It’s less, or never, about lifeenvy.
“Lifestyle envy,” sure: when you get married, there is narcotic attention, and there are presents, and an imperative to make an esthetic statement in dresses and flowers and jewelry. Mostly, there is an easy slip into the warm waters of adult social acceptance that follows marriage I can’t think of one girl in a 100-kilometre radius who wanted what the other one had: that guy, that wedding, that particular happiness.
Instead, the conflict that often comes up is about the devastating divergence of a shared trajectory. If there is resentment, judgment, anger and loss, it’s not because of the comparison, it’s because weddings are about one friend actively, if symbolically, leaving and spending a year of Saturdays preparing for it. The betrayal is mandatory — like growing up.
Having to support someone you love through their wedding, even when you’re psyched for them, or as your heart is breaking, or both, is so painful and surprising and consuming and enraging that it can be easier to roll your eyes, show up late to a fitting, hate their colour palette, and never talk about, process and parse what’s happening, what’s scary and weird and exciting about a wedding and marriage.
The best part of being a woman — other women — is the first thing to go.