Bridezilla

Emma and I were musing the other day at how we are getting to an age where all our friends are getting married off. It was sparked by a comment on a friends Facebook status (who is married off) about her baby, and another girl from school (who is also married off) had commented. At first I didn’t know who it was. I mumbled the name a few times to familiarise my brain with it while Emma looked on with confusion, as if she has caught me sleep talking, until I finally proclaimed “Jenny Jones got married!!” (This is not her actual name, in case you know a Jenny Jones and I create an accidental rumour).  Emma was surprised and went off into some rant about how everyone we knew was pregnant, married, engaged or all a variety of the above. We are, I might add, both single. We merrily co habit in our lovely little flat, cooking soup, feeding stray that come by and planning what we are going to watch on the TV. I might even take up knitting. We are bringing old lady back into fashion!

And it made me think about brides, bridesmaids, mother of the brides, bridezillas and general crazy people. I know it must be dreadfully exciting to have all that organising to do; lists to make, food to taste, dresses to try…. But something about having a ring on your finger seems to make women go, well, insane.

A few people I know are in the process of getting married, and I have to say that an early observation is that it makes at least one member of the bridal party completely mental. Let’s call it wedding fever, and if you haven’t seen the film Bridesmaids then I would. Its brilliant and I can assure you that the majority of it is completely true.

One bride to be that I am friends with is very sane, yet commented to me about the mental-ness of her loved ones. One bridesmaid tried on her dress, threw a strop about the fatness of her arms and went home, refusing to do any more. Another’s mother has taken it on herself to feel like she is in control of the entire wedding and when the bride to be commented about not wanting wedding favours (who ACTUALLY EATS sugared almonds anyway?) she was told “oh but love you have to, its tradition!”.

Emma’s sister is getting married in the summer, and recently Emma joined her at a wedding fayre up in London, packed full of dresses and shoes and flowers and all the other things that brides waste an enormous amount of their dad’s money on for one day. I got a text message at about eleven simply saying:

“This is hell. It’s like being a battery chicken. They are ALL. MENTAL” the next one requested that when one of us got married we forgo the wedding fayre, choosing to go to a pub and sit in a beer garden drinking cider. Sounds right up my street really. Another friend of mine attended the same show so I thought I would ask her about it from a bridal point of view. Her response was pretty similar. She said it was ridiculously hot and at one point a woman came up to her asking if she was going to buy the dress she had in her hand, adopting a rabid look and taking it from her when the answer was no.

The truth is, all us girls love a good bridal programme. If you read Vix’s latest post on Don’t Tell the Bride, you will know that it’s a bit of a craze here in the UK. Throw in a bit of Four Weddings (a soul destroying yet addictive show where brides score other brides weddings to win a honeymoon) and a recent one I found on one of our new channels (after balancing the aerial on the clothes horse to get signal for the TV, we eventually got a boy round who fiddled with it and we now have eight channels. Result!) called Bridezilla, we are saturated with it. My last find was so mental that for a good deal of time I perched on the end of the sofa repeating “I just don’t know what they are saying!” they were deep American and really het up about something, but all I could make out was restraining order, body con dress, and “Aooohw noe she did-dunt!”

It seems there is only one cure for this, menfolk. If you are going to propose, make sure that there is very little time between this and the actual wedding date, so that your fiancées mad fever cannot take over. Or alternatively, take yourself down the pub and wait till it is over.