Walking Down the Aisle without Losing Your Mind

I Do but I Don't
by Kamy Wicoff

Why is the stereotypical image of the bride before her wedding day that of a stressed, moody, indecisive, and frustrated woman cracking under pressure and snapping at everyone in sight? Why does being a bride feel like going through a second adolescence? And why, with the rate of couples seeking counseling for wedding-related debt doubling from year to year, do we continue to spend absurd amounts of money on this institution? Examining how the pressure to give into the crowd (mothers, mothers-in-law, caterers, dressmakers, bridesmaids, the groom himself) and the associated traditions (wearing white, being given away, being introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Groom) is sometimes at odds with the "progress" the bride and groom may have made on these issues in private, Kamy Wicoff answers these questions and more in this sure-to-be-talked-about look at the modern bride. Through poignant and funny personal experience, eye-opening conversations with other brides, and scholarly and popular research, she strives to find both the personal and cultural meaning of all the trappings and traditions-from the proposal to the ring, to the dress, and even the bachelorette party. Her insights will blow the roof off the proverbial wedding tent. Her passionate argument for conscious marriage will ring true to the thousands of women planning weddings every day. To keep our sanity, our integrity, and our relationships intact, Wicoff says, "the way we marry matters."

I will never forget the first time I saw myself in a proper wedding dress. I walked into the fitting room wearing jeans, boots, a T-shirt, and, believe it or not, green underwear. I emerged before a wall of brightly lit mirrors to see . . . a bride. The image knocked the wind out of me. Seeing myself clothed that way, with a veil, full skirts, and a long flowing train, seized me with emotions so unexpected, fierce, and complex that I was immobilized. Surprisingly, however, I have since come to value that moment for its clarity. When I walked out of that fitting room, I was totally, unavoidably disabused of the notion — heavily advertised by every modern wedding magazine, website, and guide — that being a bride was about being "myself." (The Knot's Book of Wedding Gowns actually calls its shopping chapter "Finding Yourself.") Instead I saw that being a bride was not about being myself, but about finding myself as a bride, because a bride is not an individual woman, but an icon of womanhood; a bride is not a person, but a thing.

Seeing myself transformed into a thing so symbolic, so timeless, and so utterly feminine enthralled me in a way I had never anticipated. But for an instant I allowed myself to acknowledge that it unnerved me in a way I'd never anticipated, either. Something about playing the role of bride felt threatening, though I couldn't say what felt threatened, exactly, and I couldn't say why. Face-to-face with this vision of myself in bridal attire, however (recognizable no matter how "unique" the dress may be), a litany of questions rushed into my head for the first time that day. It rushed in with the force of things that have been forcibly held back: Can I be me and be a bride, too? What does being a bride mean? What is it asking of me? What am I asking from it?

Tears sprang to my eyes.

"It's the wrong dress," said the friend with me that day, squeezing my hand.

It was the wrong dress. Hers was the voice of reason — or at least of wedding logic — and I welcomed it. I felt wrong in it because it wasn't me. In the right dress, I would feel right. I had no desire to dig any deeper than that, and resolutely retreated back into the fog of denial that sustained me (sort of) throughout my engagement. I was determined to have a big, beautiful, mostly traditional wedding no matter what, and I did.

THIS is a book about my experience getting married. It is not a boy-meets-girl story, however. It is a girl (and boy)-meets-culture story — the story of the head-on collision between individuals and societies that weddings bring about, and how American women my age, the daughters of baby boomers, are handling it. It is also the story of what women confront whenever they confront The Bride: a definition of womanhood that is narrower, more traditional, and more troublesome than many of them would like to admit. It is a difficult subject, more difficult than I knew when I began writing about it. For one thing, very few women (and I corresponded with more than eighty, some married, some not, ranging in age from twenty-three to forty-five, as they filled out the series of questionnaires I created regarding all things weddingy) are willing to acknowledge the idea that, in this modern era, any such thing as "a definition of womanhood" exists, and are even less inclined to acknowledge that such a definition has the power to dictate their behavior. In fact, the most fervent, consistently held belief the women I interviewed expressed was that in a post-feminist, post-sexual-revolution world, women are free to define womanhood themselves, making any discussion of the social and cultural pressures women experience as brides irrelevant and even insulting.

Feel funny in a white dress? the thinking goes, Then don't wear one! And if you do, you've forfeited your right to bitch about it! Case closed.

It is a testament to the power of this logic that despite having long been somewhat unusual in my continued and public embrace of feminism — the "f-word" now eschewed even by many women who share feminist ideals — I, too, believed I had the power to define being a bride, rather than be defined by it. And this belief kept me quiet — though just barely — as I waited, humiliated, for my boyfriend Andrew to propose to me, because I was unwilling to propose to him. And this belief kept me from asking questions later when, affianced, I spent more money and time on my appearance than I ever had in my life, and was treated as though landing a man was the pinnacle of my career while Andrew's manly, money-making career soldiered on . . . and so much more.

I clung to it largely because when it came to just about everything regarding my engagement and my wedding, I wanted to conform: to do it right, and do it well. I believed I could do this and preserve my modern, independent, feminist self because I was freely choosing it. If I "chose" to be a bride-by-the-book, I told myself, it would cost me nothing. Rightly convinced that nobody should tell me how to be a woman or a bride, I failed to see that anti-feminist backlash had ingeniously co-opted this belief to convince me that nobody could — and if I "let" them, I had nobody but myself to blame. And falling into this syllogistic trap did cost me. Sometimes it cost me my sanity. More important, it cost me an invaluable chance to see the way I, my husband-to-be, and our relationship were, and always had been, products of our culture, and how we could meaningfully resist, embrace, or reconfigure that relationship for better, not for worse.

At the time, however, convinced that I had both the ability and the right to play the role of bride without buying into the "old" assumptions that underlay it, and convinced that if being a bride threatened my sense of self, my sense of self must be shakier than it should be, I kept the growing, simmering, nagging inner conflict I felt suppressed, buried under piles of things-to-do-lists, wedding magazines, and, in the end, hidden behind a veil. I simply accepted the fact that I was moody, tetchy, and tense most of the time, even as I found myself, with alarming frequency, acting (and feeling) a lot like a twelve-year-old girl. Once, after I apologized to my mother for snapping at her with the same raw agitation I felt in the seventh grade, she said: "Don't be silly! You're a bride, sweetheart. All brides are like that!" On that point, she was right.

A shocking number of brides are like that. Harried, stressed, emotional, and moody in varying degrees, women in the midst of the modern wedding experience have brought us the term "Bridezilla," and have made the term "wedding planner" part of the national vocabulary. They have sought professional help in record numbers, not just from wedding planners but from the newly extant ranks of wedding therapists and wedding coaches, too. Most women, of course, are not Bridezillas, nor do they pay professional counselors to guide them through engagement. But extraordinary numbers of ordinary women feel isolated, freaked-out, and in a general state of crisis from the time they start thinking about engagement rings to the time they put wedding bands on their fingers. And this bridal state of mind has deeper roots than any of the existing literature — if it can be called that — begins to address. The fact is that the usual suspects for bridal stress — in-laws, dress panic, financial worries, and incompetent florists — are not what have driven hundreds of thousands of women my age to seek guidance, comfort, and relief wherever they can find it. Instead, a complex range of factors, particular to the post-feminist, post-sexual-revolution world in which these women came of age, have made women of my generation more avid about weddings than ever (fueling an unprecedented, decade-long wedding-industry boom) and more conflicted about them than ever, too.

WEDDINGS are, and always have been, the primary method of communication between a society and its individuals about what adult women and men are supposed to do and be. The first reason all brides are "like that," i.e., like hormonal twelve-year-olds? Being a bride is like being sent back to the seventh grade, and not just because you are supposed to keep a scrapbook and try on eighteen shades of lipstick. Seventh grade is the first time girls run headfirst into a set of cultural expectations for them as girls that often clash directly with who they've begun to be as people. Seventh grade is how-to-be-a-girl (or else) boot camp. And as Mary Pipher pointed out in her book Reviving Ophelia, which I read years before my wedding but which later became an eerily accurate primer for my experience as a twenty-seven-year-old bride, feminism can actually make this collision even more confusing. At twelve, girls find that while society pays lip service to female equality, becoming an acceptable, desirable girl means downplaying your intelligence (even if you still get good grades), getting a boyfriend, and being hot and thin. At twenty-five — the average marrying age for an American woman — women find that although society pays lip service to female equality, becoming an acceptable, marriageable woman means putting your career second to your man's (even if you still work, as you almost surely do), getting married . . . and being hot and thin.

I remember feeling betrayed the first time I collided with this reality as a girl in San Antonio, Texas, in 1985. I was especially angry with my mother, because she'd fought harder than anyone to convince me that the world was completely different than it had been in 1960, when she was twelve. But when she insisted I didn't have to shave my legs or that I could ask boys out I wanted to yell: Don't pretend what's happening isn't happening! Just tell me how to use Nair!

Thankfully, back then the world really was different.

"Lip service" to female equality was a great deal more than that. Feminism had made real gains for women, and if I found the messages maddeningly contradictory, at least they were contradictory, and not of the uniform, "girls can be wives, secretaries, or spinsters" variety. With my parents' help, and the help of the feminist movement, I mostly recovered from the seventh grade. In college and afterward, not a girl but not yet a wife, I learned how to be a woman and myself in a way that worked for me. It wasn't perfect, but it felt authentic, and falling in love with Andrew was part of it. We helped each other let go of our most stereotypical male/female training, and by the time we were ready to marry, I felt I'd achieved some long-sought, hard-earned balance.

Which is what made the second collision — the second betrayal — such a shock. From the moment I knew I wanted to marry Andrew, which was the moment I realized I wasn't allowed to marry him until he asked me (a rule far more sacrosanct than boys-ask-girls-out, as evidenced by the fact that my liberated mother made it clear she'd be "concerned" if I "had" to ask him), I was blitzed with a set of tasks, assumptions, expectations, and rituals that were seventh-grade redux. In case I'd forgotten — what with my job, my premarital sex life, my foul mouth, and my freedom — my real job was to be a passive, professionally pretty, self-absorbed party planner, eager to play house and be judged for my success with boys above all else. What was really scary was that this was not the seventh grade. It was preparation for life as an American wife. Weddings, for example, are the double shift's first shift, as the vast majority of brides assume primary responsibility for wedding planning and work full-time, too. Andrew and I fell into this lopsided labor "sharing" even though neither of us, in theory, would have called it fair. But it was much easier to praise Andrew for being involved than to admit that I was doing most of the work because I was The Bride. The power of the bride-and-groom script overpowered us — or perhaps exposed how much we'd internalized the roles after all, and just how precarious the balance we'd prided ourselves on striking really was.

© 2006 by The Perseus Books Group

About the Author

A contributor to Salon.com, Kamy Wicoff lives in New York City. She is married and the mother of one. This is her first book.