Never a Bridesmaid, Kind of a Bride

What happens when you don’t really want to be the center of attention at your own wedding?

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

by Lila Erbemia

I never fantasized about my wedding when I was a kid. I never really felt like a girl, even long before the term nonbinary entered popular culture. Whenever my fellow second-grade classmates, the same ones that said I wasn’t popular enough to be cast as one of the Spice Girls at recess, would gush over their future nuptials, I always zoned out. That, or I had some general medieval/boho/hippie theme prepared to be “on brand” in case they asked me (which they usually didn’t).

Even at the time, I couldn’t fathom their obsession with a single (very expensive) event. Maybe it was because I would start to show signs of my own obsessive-compulsive disorder by middle school, scrubbing my hands multiple times a day until they dried out, cracked, and bled. Maybe it was due to growing up poor in middle-of-nowhere Appalachia, where we relied on family and neighbors for so much and saw the effort that anything took day after day—no dropping thousands of dollars on a wedding planner for us. Maybe it was the fear that I would never be attractive or feminine enough to attract a boy, which seemed like it was a Very Important Priority.

That isn’t to say I hated weddings outright. It felt special to be the flower girl for my uncle, even though I was disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to scatter the flower petals and was only allowed to walk up the aisle holding the basket. I loved being the guest book attendant for my cousin’s wedding because I got to play with a fancy ostrich feather pen and it was another excuse to dress up for fun. And I gained a reputation as an energetic kid for dancing the night away at family wedding receptions, rambunctiously dragging the cousins close to my age to the floor and jumping around to the point of exhaustion.

The thing is, I could never picture myself being the main focus of an event like that. It was so much attention, so much pressure. I was always the one people said was shy, reserved, “backwards” socially. Even before I learned about the deep roots of patriarchy in marriage and the wedding ceremony, I always felt a vague sick feeling of thinking the bride looked sacrificial up on the altar in white, like she was about to lose herself. Even with the smiles, the ceremony felt like a vastly unequal exchange. Needless to say, I’d only been to straight cis Christian weddings in my family and this severely limited my perception of what a wedding and marriage could be.

I spent years avoiding the topic, studying hard, and favoring unrequited crushes to the rare times I dated. Then finally, in my early twenties, I did meet someone who I wanted to stay with for the long term. He wasn’t Catholic or even religious, he suffered from bipolar disorder, and he had multiple piercings and a tattoo. In other words, my mom wasn’t thrilled by my choice and there was a very real possibility of being disowned for the year that I “lived in sin” with him (aka our engagement). But after we actually got married, my mom gradually started to soften because he hadn’t left me (even though I had already told her he wouldn’t).

The wedding planning and ceremony were stressful with the cloud of my mom’s reluctance hanging over them; ironically, we were getting married so soon in large part to appease her. We did everything we could to keep things as cheap as possible and still ended up broke for months afterward. I had just graduated college and my spouse was finding his footing in the job market as someone with chronic health conditions. I guess it was fortunate that I didn’t have any strong pull toward the lavish affair that the wedding industrial complex wanted me to have. We were also privileged to be able to pass as a heteronormative couple even though later we would both come out as bisexual.

I did need something to wear, though, as a minimum piece of the puzzle. I opted for an iridescent purple prom dress that I found for under $100; I liked that it wasn’t the familiar boring plain white. Instead of a veil, I wore a rhinestone tiara with it, to which my mom said, “At least that makes you look a little bit like a bride.” Despite her distaste, I got a lot of compliments on the dress.

Through it all, my maid of honor and bridesmaids helped me immensely. I’m an only child and there’s an age gap between me and my spouse’s sisters, so I looked to my small pool of female friends. For my maid of honor (who I kept accidentally calling my “best maid”), I chose my childhood best friend. The other bridesmaids were my newest best friend from college and two other close friends from high school.

My college bridesmaid was the one who hosted the bachelorette party at her house, helped with most of the planning, and didn’t complain when we baked and decorated a bunch of cupcakes at her place instead of simply buying a cake. I’ve always been reluctant personally to ranking other people in a hierarchy, so the pressure of choosing made things uncomfortable, especially when it looked like I maybe should have reconsidered my choice based on how much more my college bridesmaid did to help out than my childhood friend did. But I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Since then, all of my bridesmaids but one have been married at least once. My college bridesmaid invited me to her wedding, but I wasn’t in the wedding party and I really regret that I wasn’t able to repay the way she’d gone above and beyond for me. Maybe she did mind the amount of work she’d done to help with my wedding more than she’d let on. While I easily get exhausted by many aspects of weddings, I really wanted to be a bridesmaid as a heartfelt show of thanks to my friends and to support them the way they did for me.

However, it hasn’t worked out that way yet. One bridesmaid simply got the paperwork signed at the courthouse with no ceremony, and the other had a super small (less than ten people) ceremony for her first marriage and for her second, I was invited but not as a bridesmaid. An extra sting added to this was that the former was involved in both weddings of the latter.

My childhood best friend, the one who was my “best maid,” is the only one of us who hasn’t been married yet, although she lived with someone for a long time before they went their separate ways. Sometimes I wonder if I’m selfishly holding out hope that she’ll get married, not only because I think she deserves someone a lot better than her ex, but also because that could be one of the last viable chances I would get to be a bridesmaid. Everyone knows making new friends in your thirties can be difficult and while I have made some new friends, none of the newer friendships have been as deep as the ones with my former bridesmaids.

Despite the feelings of camaraderie I have toward the women I chose as my bridesmaids, I’m also aware that I may have inadvertently hurt some other friends and close acquaintances by not choosing them. There’s always that tricky balance between having a practical cutoff number for a wedding party and the infuriatingly inane feeling of losing a popularity contest that you should have been able to win. Then again, I didn’t have a huge number of close female friends to choose from; I often was the one who didn’t mind the company of boys that I later learned (almost without exception, it seemed) were gay.

I wonder if, not fully out to myself, I was holding back just a little too much and not being fully honest with my friends. Maybe they picked up on that and that’s part of why I was never considered close enough to trust with their own special days. Maybe, in the case of one of my former bridesmaids, they also never felt “feminine” and might also have identified as nonbinary except for the deep distaste they have for any labels. Or maybe I’m continuing to project my own insecurities onto all of them, when their reasons may not have been so personal at all?

In any case, I’m glad I got through what was not exactly the happiest day of my life, but one of the most surreal and stressful. It wasn’t terrible but it also wasn’t a perfect fairytale day either. Like so much in life, my wedding day got muddled somewhere in mediocrity, but that’s okay. I’m grateful for my marriage to the extent that it gave me a chance to reflect on my place within friendships and two families. Even with the hassle, it also allowed me to deepen a relationship with my spouse of over ten years, allowing us the huge social privileges for me to stay with him when he was admitted to the hospital for a night, letting us quietly discover our bisexuality at our own pace without outside scrutiny from our families, and to make the difficult but valuable choice to work on being less codependent with one another and celebrate each others’ personal growth.

Getting married also confirmed that being realistic (or at least starting with low expectations) can sometimes be for the better in a high-pressure event where everyone has strong opinions about how it should be run. The next time I go to a wedding, I’ll try not to roll my eyes too hard at the absurdity of this endlessly repeating, important but also overdone ritual.

Lila Erbemia (she/they) is a writer and photographer from the Midwest United States.