Is the Stress of Wedding Planning Ruining Friendships Between Brides and Their Bridesmaids?
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I read an interesting story today in the New York Daily News about how, as weddings these days get even more extravagant and complicated and fraught and stressful to put together, friendships between a bride(zilla?) and her bridesmaids are more often than before becoming collateral damage in the couple’s path to the altar.
Ugh. This story is rough. And even though I’ve heard these kinds of tales before—right out of the mouths of people who have experienced them, not just in countless articles like this one—I still never get it. Perhaps the fact that I cannot even begin to fathom these sorts of situations speaks to how fortunate I’ve been in my own life when it comes to friends and family. (For instance, in the story’s first example? In my group, if a bridesmaid had to bow out of a bachleorette party at the last minute because of a “career-making work” thing, the bride would be very sad—not mad!—to miss her friend at the party, of course, but extremely pumped for her career opportunity, and would schedule drinks for immediately after the events for a mutual rehashing of them both).
But even so, it’s hard to imagine real, true, strong friendships ending over some of these things. Weddings are a high-octane kind of thing, it’s true—anything that mixes a potent cocktail of family, money, religion, strong emotion and appearances is going to be—but what aspect of them is worth losing one of your lifelong girlfriends over? I can’t help but wonder if, in some of these kinds of cases, there was already a lot of baggage hanging on the friendship to begin with, and whatever happened with the wedding was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. And in a lot of ways, I kind of hope that’s what’s happening when I hear about this stuff.
But what about you guys? Have any of you experienced this type of thing in your own wedding, or as a bridesmaid in another wedding? I want to hear that this “trend” isn’t true!
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