The Myth of the Bridezilla (hint: she's just a bride doing the best she can)

The Bridezilla is a Myth.  

She’s just a bride with a lot of (probably understandable) feelings who is trying to manage the best she can.

We’ve all heard the horror stories.  There’s the bride who required all her bridesmaids to purchase $600 chartreuse dresses, custom dyed shoes, and get French manicure acrylics...on their toenails.  Or the bride who asked her bridesmaids to reschedule their law schools exams so they could fly across the country to witness her try on dresses. Yes, yes. We have all heard the stories.  Some women lose their minds during wedding planning. What monsters. 

This characterization of a bride who has turned into a monster during her wedding planning is not only unfair, but it’s damaging to women.  

The Myth of the Bridezilla is yet another sexist way of labelling women who appear to be overly emotional in the eyes of our patriarchal society as hysterical, irrational, not to be trusted.  It is a way of demeaning women for their emotional experiences and implies that women should be better behaved, less demanding, and less feelingful. If that’s not a message that is dangerous to our hard-fought attempts at normalizing femininity and emotionality, I don’t know what is.

Now, I am not denying that some of these stories are horrifying, and that some of these women are indeed behaving unacceptably.  Some of this stuff you literally could not make up. And I didn’t. Literally everything in this intro paragraph actually happened.  Acting from a place of pure self-centeredness devoid of empathy and perspective is not acceptable and needs to be addressed when it’s happening, no matter what the context - wedding planning included.

However, by buying into the myth of the bridezilla and framing them as bizarre monsters, we perpetuate the stereotype of women as overly emotional and irrational, losing out on an opportunity to investigate what is happening for these brides that would drive them to this behavior.  As a psychotherapist, when I see someone who is acting out, I become quite suspicious that there is something happening underneath their behavior -- overwhelming emotions, for example, an internal struggle of some sort. And, that this is a phenomenon that plagues often stable, high-functioning women points not to the hideousness of their character as these stories would have us believe, but instead to the common denominator -  wedding planning, engagement, and this rite of passage of getting married. What is it about this process that seemingly transforms so many women into monsters worthy of our contempt? What is it about our culture that produces so much pressure about what this process and that day need to look like? Why aren’t we, as a society, probing those questions and attributing due responsibility to the cultural pressures, rather than pathologizing and demonizing the women who are literally crumbling under the pressure?

Instead of viewing the phenomenon of the bridezilla as a personal failure of the woman, and instead of defaulting to frustration and resentment when challenged in a relationship with a “bridezilla,” what would it be like to instead come from a place of curiosity about the powers underneath the surface that are driving your “bridezilla” to the brink of madness?  What would it be like, instead of becoming angry with her, to say, “Hey, it looks like you might be feeling really stressed, what’s going on for you and how can I support you? How is this process impacting you?” .. and sharing your honest observations and feedback?