Will Your Friendship Pass the Bridesmaid Test?

To be asked to be a bridesmaid is like reaching the top of Friendship Mountain. You’re not a regular friend. You’re the Very Important Friend entrusted to plan the bride’s last stretch of single life, to apply Band-Aids under her strappy heels seconds before she heads down the aisle, to give a speech that will make everyone laugh and then tear up and then laugh again. In other words, to make their day as special as your friendship. You two are about to feel closer than ever. At least that’s the idea.

Really, being a bridesmaid is kind of miserable, and joining someone’s bridal party is like putting your friendship through a taffy-pulling machine. It makes your friend’s annoying habits seem like fatal character flaws, and your spats feel like Bravo-worthy feuds — in many cases, it will stretch, warp, twist, and pummel your relationship within an inch of its life.

A friend of mine we’ll call Charlie felt gratified when her best friend asked her to be a bridesmaid. “You know the excitement of going through an experience with your friend?” she told me of the anticipation she had at the beginning. She and the bride had always loved chatting about clothing and events, and she’d fantasized about the creative role she’d get to play, sampling fabrics and deliberating over necklines. But, she says, “it just felt like labor — I didn’t feel like I was hanging out with my friend at all.” Instead, Charlie would just get clinical group texts about what dress to buy or where to show up. On the wedding day, she arrived at 7 a.m. to wait four hours for her hair and makeup to be done. Without warning, she was charged $500 for it on Venmo the following day.

After the wedding, “I stopped going to things she invited me to,” Charlie says. “I’d already shown up for a lot.” They had a big fight a year later when she didn’t make it to the friend’s baby shower. But really, it was already over — Charlie hadn’t forgiven her friend for the way she’d checked out of their friendship during wedding planning.

When one woman gets a bunch of her friends together to help plan her own wedding, a strange power shift happens. (That is, if they even consider themselves friends — some bridesmaids suspect they’re only included because the couple needed extra bodies to bankroll their big day.) On both sides, resentment, judgment, and shit-talking ensue. And by the wedding day, members of a bridal party often don’t feel closer to the bride — they feel exhausted, taken advantage of, and sick of being told what to wear and where to go and how to act. Add to that the fact that wedding culture is careening into new galaxies of excess — bachelorette parties suddenly ballooning into weekend trips to Tulum, reception budgets bursting at the seams — and bridesmaid-ing has never felt more taxing: a black hole of time, energy, and shared spreadsheets.

For bridesmaids like Kelly, a financial nightmare, too. Kelly readily agreed to be her high school friend Celeste’s bridesmaid, naïvely believing that, just like when Kelly’s sister got married and her parents covered all the expenses, the bride would pay for everything. It didn’t take long before she and the four other bridesmaids started getting texts requesting money for various wedding-related expenses: $250 for the shower. $300 for the bachelorette party. $450 for the dress. $50 for a makeup artist. “Half the bridal party dropped out because they couldn’t afford it,” she says. “It just kept going and going and going.” By the time Kelly contemplated doing the same, she was in too deep. “It felt like sunk-cost fallacy,” she says. “I can’t back out of this now.”

Her first fight with Celeste — not her real name — happened in April, a passive-aggressive text exchange about hairstyling that ended with Celeste crying in a broom closet at work and Kelly settling on an updo she didn’t like. (She wanted her hair half-up half-down, which Celeste, who was vetting everyone’s hair, deemed too similar to her own look.) A few months later, two friends approached Kelly to let her know Celeste had been calling her “crazy” behind her back.

By the time Celeste’s wedding rolled around, Kelly had negative $30 in her bank account. Celeste gave her a gift at the rehearsal dinner (“a bunch of stuff I didn’t need, like a Pokémon rug. What am I supposed to do with that?”), and a card that began, “We don’t always get along.” On the wedding day, her funds were so low that she had to use her supermarket’s loyalty program to buy orange juice for the bride’s mimosas. A few hours later, a third person pulled her aside to tell her the bride was saying mean things behind her back. When the couple got back from their honeymoon, Kelly sent a “vicious” text ending the friendship and blocked them both immediately. She hasn’t talked to the couple since — but heard they got divorced.

Kelly doesn’t think her friend’s stinginess, her bossiness, or her insensitivity would have ever reached such gross proportions had Kelly not been involved in her wedding. “Your friend’s negative traits get amplified,” she said. “It’s like if you have a minor annoyance, but it’s not enough to stop being friends with them. Then they get married and you’re, like, Oh, man, this is bad.” Like her, plenty of bridesmaids try to grin and bear it, assuming that suffering in silence is better for the greater good — or that their friend, a person they once thought of as empathetic and self-aware, might suddenly realize her requests have gone from supportive favors to unpaid labor.

But, as a quick scroll through wedding planning TikTok will tell you, brides are often in their own worlds, consumed with seating charts and bouquet invoices and weird in-laws-to-be — and also, you know, starting a big new chapter of their lives. When it comes to handling issues with their bridesmaids, it seems, the tone can be far more bridge-burn-y; many brides, former and future, tearfully assure each other that “not everyone makes it with you to the altar” and strongly recommend cutting bridesmaids who’ve “shown their true colors” out of your life.

And God help you if you’ve been crowned maid of honor, where the stakes are even higher and the asks far bigger. In the most traditional (and cynical) reading, a maid of honor is tasked with putting her friend above all else while the friend focuses on, well, pretty much everything else. That can make a friendship feel absurdly lopsided — especially if, when you voice your feelings, all you hear back is that, actually, you’re not doing enough.

A few years ago, Hannah was asked to be her old sorority sister Emily’s co-maid of honor — she was thrilled. Despite the distance between them — Emily lived in Seattle, Hannah in Scottsdale, Arizona — Hannah was committed to pulling her weight. Like when she ceded her one day off a week to make the three-hour flight to try on dresses. She thought everything had gone smoothly — she’d done her best to chat up Emily’s three vaguely unfriendly bridesmaids and co-maid of honor, and she’d paid for Emily’s drinks and dinner at Red Robin before asking if it was alright to duck out and catch some sleep before her early flight home. Emily seemed fine, if a little distracted, with all of it.

Then she got a post-mortem text from Emily: “How did you think this weekend went?” Hannah’s response: “It went great! Love the dress you picked, you looked beautiful, had a great time getting to know your friends.” Wrong. From Emily’s POV, Hannah had “demanded to drink champagne,” was “the last to arrive and the first to leave,” “vocalized her opinions on the bridesmaids dresses,” and “so rudely” drank Emily’s friend’s Red Bull. In reality, Hannah says, she’d tried to get the champagne flowing to get everyone excited after getting to the hotel a little late. Emily had asked the room for their opinions on the bridesmaid dresses. And that goddamn Red Bull. When the friend said she was saving it for the next day, Hannah asked if she could drink it if she bought her a new one — she was exhausted — and when the friend agreed, she got her two fresh cans and Venmoed her $5. When Hannah defended herself, Emily told her she was a “terrible friend,” and added, “I can’t believe you’re not apologizing.”

The next time Hannah heard from Emily was four months later — “Hey, how are you feeling about everything?” — but when Hannah opened up that it had been “really tough not to talk to you,” all she got back was “But you haven’t apologized yet.” They stopped talking (again), and Hannah skipped the wedding. “The more I thought about it, the more I was, like, Wait. I make no money, I flew to this thing for you, I got to know all your friends, they weren’t very warm or welcoming to me, I put in all this effort to show up for you as a friend,” she says. “I didn’t feel like the ownership was on me to make amends here.”

They didn’t get in touch again until four years later, when Emily reached out to say she was “sorry about all that stupid stuff that happened between us” and they started catching up. Now, they occasionally exchange quick texts or react to each other’s Instagram Stories. Emily lives in a small college town with her husband, horses, and three kids, while Hannah has settled in Seattle, works a full-time job in HR, and, like most of her friends, just got married last year — they have “very different lifestyles,” she says. “But I don’t think we would have drifted had this not happened.”

On some level, most bridesmaids know that if their friend is morphing into a demanding, un-self-aware narcissist before their eyes, it’s only temporary. Some even expect it. But there’s only so much that can be written off as “wedding-brain.” Taylor knew her friend Mae was “going to be a bridezilla” when she signed on to be her maid of honor and help her plan a destination wedding in Fort Myers, Florida. “I just didn’t expect our friendship to end because of it,” Taylor says. At first, Mae didn’t seem to mind that Taylor lived an hour away, was seven months pregnant, and experiencing pelvic girdle pain that made it difficult for her to sit or stand for more than ten minutes at a time. That is, until the other bridesmaids suddenly decided to decorate for Mae’s shower a day early — which would have required Taylor to sit in her car for two hours round trip, only to make the same drive the next day.

“I told the group chat I’m not gonna be able to make it,” Taylor remembers, “and she spazzed on me.” Mae told Taylor she’d “talked to all my other friends who have kids and they’ve had no issues with their pelvic floor before.” Then, Taylor says, Mae started listing all the ways she’d supported Taylor during their friendship — giving her relationship advice, listening to her cry on the phone late at night. “She was, like, ‘If I find out you’re lacking other areas, we’re gonna have some problems.’”

Taylor tried to confront Mae about the blow-up, but “she just kept repeating, ‘I’ve done all of this for you and you couldn’t have done this for me.’” They decided to brush it all under the rug until after the wedding, and managed to get through the rest of the planning without a hitch — Mae even thanked Taylor for organizing the bachelorette party, which she told her she loved. But “I was still off about everything,” Taylor says. “Later, some of her other friends told me she can be blind to what other people are going through when she wants something. But I’d never experienced that before in our friendship.” She wouldn’t dream of asking Mae to do a favor that would put her through physical pain like that — it seemed so thoughtlessly cruel. After the big day, she stopped talking to Mae altogether. A few months later, she knew she’d made the right decision when she showed up to her sister’s wedding as a bridesmaid — three days after giving birth. The planning had felt like a “night and day difference” from Mae: No drama, no fights, no bridal meltdowns. Taylor had missed the rehearsal dinner while delivering, and her sister “totally understood.”

It’s been three years since she spoke with Mae; they were friends for seven. Mae has reached out to try and talk — including a few months ago, when she had pregnancy complications of her own and apologized to Taylor for everything she’d said. It was too late. “She crossed that line,” Taylor says. “I miss her, but I can love her from afar.”

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