Always a bridesmaid, always broke

By Lisa Heyamoto
Seattle Times staff reporter

HEATHER MCKINNON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

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Really, $300 just seemed a tad too much.

On its own, maybe not. But on top of plane tickets, hotel reservations, a rental car, several gifts and all those spent vacation hours, Megan Link's best friend had to go and choose a $300 bridesmaid dress for the wedding.

"What do you do?" asked the 26-year-old who works in corporate communications. "You don't tell her that you won't buy it. So you suck it up and pay the $300."

As wedding season heats up, the brides are blushing and the grooms are glowing, but the rest of us? We're slowly going broke.

Link estimates she spent $5,000 or more attending weddings during the summer of the $300 dress. All were out of town and required travel accommodations. Two were even scheduled in Colorado on back-to-back weekends.

"It cost me less money to take the week off than to fly out twice," she said. "I haven't been able to take a vacation for me in, like, three years."

So next time, she decided she's not going to go. That's right. Call it a matrimonial boycott, but Link has flat-out, pre-emptively, no-looking-back put a financial embargo on all five of the weddings she'd been invited to this summer. She had to.

"I just can't do it," she said. "Especially to fly all that way and spend all that money and literally spend 10 minutes with the bride and groom."

It's not that she doesn't want to go. But for a gal who's used all her spare cash and vacation hours on weddings, the expense was getting out of hand.

What price friendship? Confused about modern-day manners after attending your 1,000th wedding this summer? Take some tips from two ladies who know. Even if you can't attend the wedding, you should send a gift. That rule does not hold true for showers. Base the gift on your affection for the couple, not the price. You don't have to stick to the registry. Even if you can't afford to be in the wedding party, treat the request as an honor by being excited that they asked and tactful when turning them down. It's pretty standard for wedding-party members to pay for their dress/tux and accommodations, but anything extra that the couple specifically ask for should be paid by them. Dollar dances and other money games at the reception are tacky, tacky, tacky. Be realistic about what you can afford. Be wary of feeling steamrolled — your relationship with the couple will suffer for it. Sources: Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of manners maven Emily Post, and Jeanne Hamilton, creator of the Web site Etiquette Hell (www.etiquettehell.com) and author of "Bridezilla: True Tales from Etiquette Hell" Lisa Heyamoto

Between destination weddings, weekend-long bachelor parties, umpteen showers and pricey gifts, the costs of attending someone else's wedding is on the rise, says Jeanne Hamilton, creator of the Web site Etiquette Hell and author of "Bridezilla: True Tales from Etiquette Hell."

Financially beleaguered bridesmaids like Link make up the majority of the rants on the Web site, which is an online repository for bad behavior.

Weddings net the most complaints, she said, and the financial woes are particularly bad for people in their 20s attending a lot of weddings, or members of the wedding party who are obligated to attend more events.

Yet it's not that being in a wedding is getting more expensive. Bridesmaid dresses are still averaging $150 each, tux rentals remain at $100 or so, and most people continue to spend about $50 on a wedding gift. It's the other stuff that's going up.

Take bachelorette parties. It's not just a simple night out on the town anymore. Now, weekends in Vegas, spa days and beachside getaways with the gals are setting the standard in a trickle-down effect from ever more elaborate weddings.

"If you're having a $100,000 wedding, there is sometimes pressure not to have a 'pizza party and kegger in your living room' kind of bachelorette party," Hamilton said.

Pre-wedding primping has changed too. Manis, pedis and up-dos at the salon were almost unheard-of luxuries for bridesmaids 15 years ago, Hamilton said. Today, they're expected.

As for the gifts, a gravy boat will not do. In addition to pages-long registration lists with down-to-the-color detail, a couple's expectation of wedding gifts has gone way beyond The Bon.

One submission to Hamilton's site recounts the lurid pink paper that got on the author's last etiquette nerve. It was a poem enclosed in the invite, and it went a little something like this:

"We've got appliances galore,

It's not our first time as spouse;

What we'd really appreciate

Is cash toward a house."

So what is it that seems to give to-be-weds the gall? Hamilton calls it the "culture of entitlement." Couples — and brides especially — ratchet up their expectations for their wedding day and demand things they normally wouldn't.

"The concept of a simple wedding is just not culturally relevant right now," she said. "People just kind of switch off their common sense and become nuts for a period of time."

And people seem to go along with it. Whether it's out of a sense of supporting the bride or fear of the dreaded "you've ruined my wedding" accusation, bridesmaids become pre-wedding slaves in bad pastels, inwardly seething at all they're being asked to do.

That's the stuff ruined friendships are made of, says Peggy Post, spokeswoman and author of the Emily Post Institute. The solution, she said, is simple courtesy from everyone involved.

"If these people are important to each other, there's always a way to make it work," she said.

But a good bride, she said, will try to prevent those uncomfortable talks by having realistic expectations of their friends.

Sarah Carlson, then, gets good marks in Post's book. The 28-year-old Seattle bride took pains to go easy on her friends by only inviting them to one bridal shower each, picking affordable items on her gift registry and giving the option of cheaper hotels for the out-of-town guests.

She and her fiancé even bought the dress for a bridesmaid in a financial crunch.

Link, however, is going a different route and avoiding the whole thing altogether.

"I always thought I wanted a big wedding," she said. "But I think I'd rather elope and save everyone all the time and money."

Lisa Heyamoto: 206-464-2149 or lheyamoto@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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