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Chosing Your Wedding Party | Bridesmaids, Groomsmen
DILEMMAS, DILEMMAS: WHO’S IN YOUR WEDDING PARTY?
(see our main Wedding Party page here.)
Take from our book, Take Back Your Wedding, available in e-book or paperback!
Let’s back up to a decision you may have already made: who to invite to stand up for you. You already know the issues involved, but here is a summary:Â
No small set of factors in your decision! Then add in other complications: If you have two best friends, which will be your maid of honor or groomsman? If you have three dear friends from high school and four more from college, do you have seven in your wedding party, or three, or four? Or do you ask just a subset of each group, thereby excluding the others? Ah, the loyalty binds and the potential hurt feelings! A number of these issues came together for Rachel:
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My fiancé and I just got engaged. I am having a hard time trying to choose my two bridesmaids. I only have one sister so she will be my maid of honor, but I would like to keep it to three bridesmaids so it will match the number of attendants my fiancé is having. He will have his best friend as his best man and his two brothers as his attendants. Here are the three options I am thinking about for my two bridesmaids:Â
a) Two high school friends (they do not like each other) and I do not consider us as close as we used to be; however I have known them the longest.
b) Two friends from work who I am very close with and have known for 5 years; they were both with me the night I met my fiancé at a bar.
c) My fiancé has two married brothers have wives who I really like but have only known for three years. I lean towards these two because they will be my family and I believe family is stronger than friends sometimes.
I do not want to hurt my friends from high school's feelings. I don't think any of the others would be hurt because they wouldn't necessarily expect me to ask them. However, I feel that at least one of the girls from high school does not have money to be in the wedding, and she would not be good at helping with the wedding as far as planning goes. I plan to involve everyone listed in this group somehow, but would like some other opinions.
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Got it? Where is King Solomon when we need wisdom? But Rachel at least is not feeling a lot of pressure from other people; mostly she feels internal pressure to make a good, balanced decision. Jessica, on the other hand, feels squeezed by her aunt and cousin:
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I saw my relatives for Thanksgiving, and my Aunt and female cousin were somewhat distant with me. Here is the back story:
When I announced my engagement about 4 months ago at a family party, my Aunt started saying stuff like "Oh, good, Laura (my cousin) has never been a bridesmaid before," I ignored it, and hoped she would forget, as Laura and I are not close AT ALL and I really do not want her in the wedding.
Well this week I saw them and Laura was asking about my wedding. I told her some things about it and she got really passive aggressive, saying "Oh, aren't people going to get seasick? I know I probably will." (My wedding is on a 150 foot yacht, and it stays IN THE HARBOR. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to get seasick.). It wasn't just that, it was many other things too. See, Laura is kind of bitter as she was supposed to get married a year ago and her fiancé called the engagement off. She is also my only older female cousin, and she is ten years older than me, so I think she thinks it is not fair that I am marrying first.
I do not want to have an issue with them, but I really do not want Laura in the wedding. She is very tacky, gets drunk everywhere and has tattoos all over her body. At my other cousin's wedding three years ago she got drunk and slept with TWO of the groomsmen in a car parked outside the wedding! If she does that at my wedding, I can't stop her, but at least she won't be associated with my bridal party. Besides, I already have six bridesmaids (that are all really wonderful and not passive aggressive at all.)
What do I do? I am afraid that not including her will make it worse though. Maybe I should suck it up and include her just so I do not create a rift within my family? Laura's mom is really my favorite aunt.
Thanks for any advice!
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You can imagine the tenor of the advice Jessica received from her fellow brides. Here are two strong ones, the first from a mother of a bride:
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Honestly, I wouldn’t have her do a damn thing! Why should you feel forced to have a tattooed, slutty, drunk, distant cousin bully you into having her in the wedding? Screw that! This is YOUR wedding, not anyone else's and you may regret asking her to do anything if she behaves like that! Also guess what? If she gets seasick (supposedly) she doesn’t have to come. No one should feel they have to do anything they don’t want to, and I am a mother of the bride! Girls, don’t do it if you don’t want to! If you really love your aunt and feel REALLY badly about not having Laura in the wedding, then the only other option is having her do a reading...as long as you don't fear she will embarrass you. If so, forget it. Good Luck!
I agree with the post before me. Don't be guilted into having her in your wedding!!! It is your day and you should have it the way you want it! This is the one time that it is completely okay to be selfish. Do what YOU want, not what other people want!! Good luck!Â
While we agree that Jessica should not feel coerced into having her cousin in her bridal party, we think there are bigger issues at stake. As we mentioned before, too much advice to brides and grooms nowadays take an extreme individualistic approach reflected in the second post: Be selfish, do it your way, forget what other people want. Not even Princess Di could get away with that attitude. The last time we checked, a wedding involves at least one other person besides the bride. Once you accept the idea that the wedding is about the bride, the groom, their families, and their friends and community, then the decisions become more complex. It’s wonderful for the bride to be the princess on her wedding day, but there are a lot of other people in the royal party.
So let’s look more deeply at Jessica’s situation. It’s hard not to respond to another person’s passive aggressive behavior without being passive aggressive oneself. Which is what Jessica is doing by trashing her cousin on the Internet. (She could have left out details like the number of groomsmen in the car.) Jessica would not be in this dilemma if she did not love her favorite aunt so much. It’s her aunt she is afraid of displeasing, not her cousin. And it was her aunt, perhaps feeling sorry for her daughter, who first went too far by publicly promoting Laura for the wedding party. Jessica could honor her aunt by including Laura in the wedding, but clearly not as a bridesmaid. As it stands, Jessica’s frantic worry over this decision probably stems more from her guilt about saying no than it does a realistic fear that the family will split apart. Not many families splinter over a bride’s decision to not invite a not-very-close cousin to be in the bridal party. The greater risk comes from Jessica letting herself be tormented into not making a straightforward decision, and then lashing out to third parties about how much she loathes her cousin. We end the discussion of bridal parties with our next lesson: If you let wedding party decisions get you completely riled up, it means you are not taking charge. Make a decision and move on; people will get over it if you do.
Elizabeth Doherty Thomas, is a co-founder of The First Dance, along with Marriage and Family therapist father Bill Doherty. The First Dance is a 2007 Modern Bride Trendsetter award winner for taking on the complex family dynamics of wedding planning. See what engaged couples and wedding professionals are saying about our book Take Back Your wedding. Our entire website is dedicated to offering advice on working through the people stresses of wedding planning as a couple, with your families, and how to strengthen your upcoming marriage through this enormous first task of married life.