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When the Toppers Aren’t All on the Cake
by Jen
As you may have noticed, friends tend to get married in clusters. You may even be in that crazy sweep in your mid-twenties where you can’t seem to swing a cat without getting veil in its claws.
While it’s great to have pals who are going through the same wedding craziness to talk to, it can also make things a little weird. You don’t have to be frenemies to compete with each other a bit, and weddings can bring out parts of you and your friends you didn’t know were there.
It can start with the proposal. Once one of you has the perfect one-one-knee-in-a-romantic-restaurant story and another has the charming scavenger hunt story or airplane over the baseball park story… well, it’s easy to get nervous. Are you going to be the one with the “I dunno. You want to get married or something?” story?
But it’s the planning where things can really get nuts. Even if you’re on a budget, it can be hard to stand pat on that simple white cocktail dress once you start seeing your friends in fittings with full skirts and lace sweetheart necklines. Is it that you’ve seen the Princess fantasy come to life, or is it that you’ve seen your friends looking so pretty? Sometimes that’s tough to pull apart.
It may not be jealousy. If you’ve had a tight group, you’re used to having fairly similar lives – hanging out at the same places and going to parties together. Realizing that your wedding is way above or below the budget of all your friends’ weddings can make you feel anxious. Will people think you’re showing off? Or blowing it off?
But having similarly scaled weddings may not help either. If five of you are getting married in the next year, it’s normal to want to stand out… And that’s where the competition can start to tear into your budget. It can manifest as a sudden scrapping and redoing of your wedding colors, or as a quiet one-upmanship where no one knows where the crazy line is. If one of you is releasing butterflies, does the next have to release doves? Longer trains? Higher cakes? Is one of you considering dropping the DJ and hiring The Polyphonic Spree? You might be hitting the crazy line.
The competition doesn’t just go upscale, either. I’ve seen brides quietly jockey to have the most simple wedding or the most alternative wedding. Trying to throw the most casual-but-still-a-wedding wedding isn’t so bad, but once you get into throwing the most environmentally responsible wedding or the most readings of heartfelt free verse wedding, you are beginning to annoy your guests. Even here, there is a crazy line, and it may be well behind you.
The only thing to do is take a deep breath and refocus. Remember that you’re marrying your fiancé, not your friends. So the wedding should be about what you and he want, not what the girls are doing. In an emergency, take a moment to light a few scented candles and commune with your budget. There’s no need to compete yourself out of a down payment on a house.
And, really, if it all seems too similar, don’t worry. The truth is, six months after your wedding, people will mostly remember who got loopy enough to start freestyle rapping during the reception.
If you miss the competition at that point, all you have to do to re-start it is get pregnant.
