Being A Bridesmaid Is Why I Need Feminism

I am a bridesmaid for a wedding in a few weeks. I am happy to support my friend while she celebrates her marriage. But jesus. fucking. christ. being a bridesmaid is like entering an alien planet where people assume you are the shallowest, most bored person to ever exist.

“Will people think this is too much baby’s breath?”

I cannot stress my answer to each of these questions (there are many per day): no one cares. The kind of people that notice “too much baby’s breath” don’t really seem very cool or interesting to me. Let them judge themselves all the way out of your life. It will be an improvement. My personal advice would be to purposely use too much baby’s breath to accelerate this process.

I spent an hour at a department store this morning buying socks for the groom and groomsmen. I don’t know these men very well, but they are adults, at least chronologically. Why am I buying socks for them? I’m a servant, apparently, or “better equipped” to deal with tasks too trivial for a man’s brain.

I feel like being a bridesmaid in a wedding is like being made to sit at the metaphorical kid’s table of life. It’s expected that I have opinions about burlap vs. satin, lavender vs. light purple, and whatever else.

No.

This is minutiae. I am an adult human and yet the cultural consensus is that these are Important Decisions to me. It’s demeaning as hell.

I don’t mean any of this to reflect poorly on the girl’s wedding I’m in. She’s actually a pretty laid-back bride. It’s wedding culture as a whole that places the expectation on me to exist in this wading pool of “concerns” when I know how to swim with the big kids. Let me out, please.

I used to be an event planner. I know it’s important to make a beautiful event and that part of that is detail work. The difference is that I was getting paid to have an opinion, it was a job I was respected for, not something everyone assumes I’m obsessed with because I have nothing more interesting to care about than my eventual wedding. I’m not against enjoying trivial things in life in general, but expecting a person to care about a certain kind of trivial thing because of their gender (or whatever) is archaic.