Not Having Bridesmaids? You Can Still Officially Invite Your Best Girls to Be Your Non-Bridesmaids

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One of my best friends, Jess, recently got engaged, and she and her fiancé are not doing the whole big wedding-party thing. No bridesmaids, no groomsmen—just his brother standing up for him and her sister standing up for her.

But, you know how, when a friend asks you to be a bridesmaid, there is usually a prelude—whether she does it in writing or over a bottle of wine—about how much she loves you and how big your friendship is in her life and how she’s so pumped you’re going to share in this particular time and experience with her before she says and, you know, Will you wear the dress? Well, turns out you can still do that part without asking them to wear the dress.

Jess still wanted to take the opportunity during this time to let us know how much we mean to her—and, practically, to officially say, Oh and by the way, I’m not doing bridesmaids to anyone who might have been wondering (if you knew Jess, you’d know that the probability was pretty high she wasn’t going to and would also be waiting to see if indeed she was going to skip it)—and when she stumbled across this post on (ha!) A Practical Wedding, she decided she would do just that.

And so, we all got a lovely note from her—she didn’t, for a few reasons, do the Evite thing like the author in the above post did, but rather opted to use Paperless Post, which has options for sending things that aren’t literal invitations—telling us that while her sister would be going it alone in any kind of official bridesmaid capacity for her wedding, that we were everything to her, that she couldn’t wait to share in the experience of getting married with us by her side, and that she hoped we would be able to celebrate with them as they tied the knot in a few short months.

I love this idea for a bride who, for whatever reasons, isn’t having a bridal party but still wants to acknowledge the special ladies in her life. And I haven’t heard of it before! So I checked in with veteran wedding planner Lynda Barness of I Do Wedding Consulting to see if she had, and as it turns out, I’m not alone: This was new to her, too. But also like me, she liked it a lot, and even suggested a fun little addendum to the official non-bridesmaid thing: That the bride gather her non-bridesmaids for a special photo at some point on the wedding day!

“This could be as a group, or individually, depending on the numbers, and then afterwards the bride could send the photo to each of the women,” she says. “Since there would have been bridesmaid shots if there had been a bridal party, this would be the same type of thing.”

We like this, too! What do you think, Jessie?

And what do all you other no-wedding-party brides think? Would you do—or did you do—something like this for your non-bridesmaids? 

RELATED: 16 Fun Ways to Ask Your Girls to Be Your Bridesmaids 

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