Secret confessions of bridesmaids: ‘The dress alone cost me two months’ rent’

When one of her fellow bridesmaids got “sacked” from the role, then uninvited from the wedding, Kate had an idea that she was in for a testing few months. “I was a little bit alarmed by the intensity of the whole situation,” she says of the run-up to the wedding of her friend Stella. “I feel like weddings are something you should look forward to and that should evoke a sense of joy, but I was perturbed by the stress of it all. It didn’t seem to me that she got any enjoyment out of it.”

Kate was tasked with organising the hen weekend for about 25 friends. The bride made it clear that she did not expect to pay anything towards it. “I didn’t fully understand the real sense of entitlement she had when it came to how she thought she should be treated as a bride-to-be,” says Kate. During discussions about where they could stay that could accommodate everyone, within budget, Stella told Kate that she wasn’t doing her job as organiser well enough. “She said: ‘You’re not performing to the standard I would expect.’ In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous, but we were stuck in the throes of it at the time.”

She told me what a bad friend I’d been and that I should be grateful she’d asked me to do it

On the Saturday night of the weekend, after a long couple of days, they went to a nightclub, but the guests were tired and had drunk too much; they were flagging. “She wasn’t happy about that, because she wanted it to be an all-nighter, a legendary kind of experience,” says Kate. “She got really upset and we ended up in the toilet with her crying and saying that it wasn’t good enough.”

Kate was told it was her responsibility to get everyone to enjoy it more and that if the other hens still failed to look as though they were having a good time, they were to be ejected – not from the nightclub, but from the rest of the weekend, so that the bride-to-be wouldn’t have to see them in the morning. “I was very much getting fatigued by it,” says Kate, leaning into the understatement.

For the wedding itself, Kate paid for her bridesmaid dress and for the hair and makeup artist. In total, she thinks she spent comfortably more than £1,000 on her friend’s wedding. Except they are no longer friends. Some time later, she says, “I got ditched. It was similar to the excommunication of the first bridesmaid.”

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With wedding season at its peak, disgruntled bridesmaids may be counting the cost – financially and emotionally – of being in a bridal party. A recent post on the forum Reddit, asking if it was normal to be charged $300 (£240) to go to a bridal shower , was the latest of many horror stories posted there to go viral. On the Reddit board r/weddingshaming , bridesmaids share tales of being ordered to go on a diet, spend a small fortune or have weekly check-ins.

Kate was one of many women who responded to a Guardian callout asking for onerous experiences of being a bridesmaid. She worried her story might sound a bit misogynistic – “the stereotype of the bridezilla” – but she knows Stella’s behaviour “wasn’t reasonable”. Of course, the problem is not exclusive to women, she adds. “Men behave appallingly, too.”

Jo was asked to be a bridesmaid by a childhood friend with whom she had all but lost contact. Her initial surprise made her say yes, then she tried to get out of it: “We had the most awkward conversation, with her telling me what a bad friend I’d been and that I should be grateful she’d asked me to do it.”

She suggested I could work around my pregnancy; I could induce early, or something

Jo had short hair, but the bride-to-be demanded that she grow it. At the wedding, five months later, “I had this not-a-bob, not-a-pixie-cut, really awkward hairstyle”. When the bride’s mother saw Jo, she was unimpressed, as if Jo hadn’t tried hard enough to grow her hair. Afterwards, their friendship became as distant as it had been before.

Other respondents described being surprised and hurt by the hierarchy – who gets chosen to be chief bridesmaid or maid of honour – causing them to re-evaluate sometimes decades of friendship. Some discovered they were last-minute backup choices. One woman was excited to be asked, only to find out six others had turned down the request. Another is having to go on two hen weekends, one abroad, for a single wedding: “It will be a true test to see if my friendship with the bride can outlast the wedding.”

Others talk of the tyranny of the WhatsApp group, where everyone else greets hen party escalations with enthusiasm and heart emojis, rather than pointing out that the agreed budget has been long forgotten. One woman who loves being a bridesmaid – she has had the pleasure eight times in 10 years – says it’s mainly so she can be instrumental in keeping down the cost of the hen party: “All eight of my experiences have not been as financially ridiculous as some of the hen parties I’ve been invited to as a guest.” A survey last year suggested that the average cost of being a bridesmaid in the UK was £665.

This isn’t a recent phenomenon. In the 90s, Julie was so worn down by the endless demands on her as a bridesmaid that she ended up at her friend’s wedding three weeks after giving birth, exhausted and in pain, breastfeeding her newborn in the loos with her dress around her ankles.

The bride, Val, had made Julie keep her diary open for about 18 months – and hold back annual leave – while she decided when exactly to hold her special day. In that time, Julie became pregnant. Val chose her due date for the wedding, yet insisted Julie be there. “She suggested I could work around it; I could induce early, or something,” says Julie. “I said: ‘No, that’s not how that’s going to work.’”

A hen party at seven months pregnant wasn’t fun, even less so because Julie was the designated driver. She managed to get out of the follow-up bridal shower, where everyone was expected to bring presents – which was just as well, because she went into labour. Julie ended up giving birth three weeks early.

Why did she not just pull out of the wedding? “Because I was still attempting to maintain a friendship. At that point, she made it clear: ‘If you don’t come, I will never speak to you again.’ It felt like: OK, this is that important to her, I can suck it up.” The friendship finally ended a few months later, when Julie refused to attend a post‑honeymoon party. Val sent her a letter, saying: “You obviously think this baby is more important than I am.” Julie laughs. “I’m like: well, yes.”

It is surprising, says the wedding planner Mark Niemierko, how many relationships between brides and bridesmaids don’t last. He says it happens particularly among people in their 20s. “It’s not that they fall out, but if you ask them 10 years down the line: ‘Would that person still be a bridesmaid or best man?’ they wouldn’t. That’s just life; you move on.” So, if you are cowering under a deluge of unreasonable requests and soaring costs, it’s worth bearing in mind that, a decade from now, you may not even be friends.

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For many people, however much you want to celebrate a couple’s day, being a wedding guest feels like a chore. “You’ve got to get your outfit, you might need time off work, transport, maybe to sort out childcare,” says Niemierko. For bridesmaids, the tasks – dress shopping and fitting, planning the hen party, having to show interest in everything from caterers to playlists – can seem endless.

In the US, it’s usual for bridesmaids to pay for their own dress, says Niemierko. He has also seen the rise of the party where bridesmaids are anointed by the bride-to-be: “It’s another excuse for an event. People are invited to a tea or something, just to be asked.” It may catch on in the UK, he adds. Niemierko has seen bridesmaids take on the role of keeping the bride calm on the day, while others have been “reluctantly forced into taking on the planner role”. Then there are friendship politics, “where somebody has to be a bridesmaid because it will cause a whole drama in the friendship group otherwise”.

Perhaps as a reflection of the uncomfortable truth that being a bridesmaid can be a bit of a pain, brides are having fewer. “Generally, they are over the whole ‘I’m going to have six or more women all in the same dress’ thing. I’d say it’s become more popular to have just one bridesmaid.” Or, even better, choose only children: “It’s classier – and they’re cute.”

I couldn’t complain about the price, because everybody was just saying how lovely it was

When Elena was asked to be a bridesmaid for her friend Ava, she didn’t expect to spend so much. But Ava earned much more money than Elena and the costs spiralled. The designer dress she wanted Elena to wear (and pay for) was the equivalent of two months’ rent; paying for her hair and makeup on the day could have paid her rent for another month.

“I didn’t say anything,” says Elena. “I was too embarrassed. I didn’t know how to present the issue without sounding like I didn’t want to be part of it. I admit that I should have set limits, I just didn’t know how.” She couldn’t afford to buy her friend a present on top of everything else, which caused her more anxiety.

Related: Wedding wars! How photographers took over – and vicars fought back

For Kat, being a bridesmaid three times in a year obliterated her finances. She had to put some of the expense on a credit card and live carefully all year to pay for it. She ended up spending about a quarter of her annual salary on these weddings.

Among her friendship group, it had become usual for bridesmaids to pay for their own dresses and to go on hen weekends abroad. “I and one of the other bridesmaids used to complain together, but generally I felt as if I couldn’t complain about the price, because there was a kind of groupthink going on, where everybody was just saying how lovely it was.”

At one hen party dinner, she ordered a bowl of soup, because it was all she could afford. “I felt honoured to be asked, but frustrated by the amount it cost,” she says. Just as her finances were getting back on track the year after, she was asked to be a bridesmaid again.

Some names have been changed