Thoughts on a Wedding from outside

Source: Google Images

 I don't know what was I thinking, but I agreed to be a bride's maid for a friend. Yes, I know. A bride's maid, when I don't believe in the institution of marriage and I advocate for independence and freedom, and also the freedom in the relationships, open and free, where - if anything keeps you together then it should be waking up each day and each day deciding to stay or leave the person or persons you are with.

Anyway, this friend is getting married with her boyfriend from ten years, and she asked me. I did tell her, I can't be very involved, I have a lots of commitments with my job and my studies. so yes, I can't participate in a lot of things and she accepted it. So, so far so good. Things have been light and all, but then, bills started to build in. On one hand there was the bride's maid dress, which - fortunatelly - can actually be transformed, and not like the silver one I still have hanging in my closet.

The thing is that some things have changed for me, and I decided to start saving in earnest, so I'm looking closely at every penny I spend. This is how I started to pay closer attention to the money I was being expected to spend on someone else's wedding and all the partying and activities around it. The dress, the gift for the wedding, the gift for the bachelorette's party, the fee for the bridal's shower, the gift for the bridal's shower... The bill is quickly raising above $300 or even more, and that's in a country where the average incomes sits at about $400.

Honestly, being called and "invited" to the bridal's shower, after the bride had floated the idea of a bachelorette party in a hotel room where all the bride's maids and the bride would stay over (and pay $255 each... plus the gift), alreeady started to ring some alarm bells in my head.

I know she want's a grand wedding, and she lives in the kind of group where all her friends are getting married and they all compete for who makes the biggest production out of the wedding and the surrounding parties and... "cash/gift grabbing" occasions? As if there was no pandemic going on, and as if we were not in a country were death and infection statistics weren't going through the roof, with hospitals already collapsing, sending back sick people because there are no more beds. I know she was affected at first, at the idea of only having a religious ceremony, because she wanted her reception, but the way this is ballooning into - at least - five different events (all of them demanding gifts and at least two of them demanding a fee), it's beyond crazy for me.

Are they not concerned about the health of people? What makes them think people can't get sick by meeting so many times? Are they so easily swayed by the fake promise made from the renting locations that "they keep the protocols", when protocols must be kept on all sides?

And then, the money. Why the need to squeeze their guests for so much money? Sure, I keep the dress, but it's not a dress I actually need. I'm working from home, I don't need that dress, nor the transformed version I'll pay for it later in order to be closer to being able to use it more than once. And why the fees? People isn't swimming in money right now, so why can't they only do the activities they can pay for by themselves, and also consider which are actually sensible to organize given the current situation.

I have always considered activities that demand a fee from the guests as a distasteful thing. Your guests are not asking you to organize them, so if you decide to do them, do them within your budget. Don't make your guests pay for your ideas. And demanding a gift... how tacky is that?

Weddings always make me pity the couple: all this need for attention, this grand production only to receede later on into a life that's not a reflection of the grand production they put on, an aftermath only to be shadowed by the next big production. Why people who get married can't simply get married and be done with it? Why the production and the implicit lie?