Wedding- bill blues

If wedding planners tagged bridesmaids with skill levels, Arica Colley would quickly vault to master status. She's been a bridesmaid eight times and a part of the bride's house party so frequently that she's lost count.

The sunny 27-year-old from Arlington, Texas, is the kind of friend who, on top of organizing bridesmaids' gifts, picks up knickknacks for the new couple's home and tells her soon-to-be-married gal pals to "just let me take care of the details."

Yet even Colley, a self-professed wedding lover, has become so exasperated with the over-the-top demands on the female members of the wedding party that she nearly split with one newly married friend after the wedding.

"We didn't talk for almost six months," she admits.

For the wedding in question, the bride had expected Colley to not only buy a dress, pay for alterations, pick up new shoes and jewelry, but to attend not one, but 10 showers. Oh, and the bachelorette party? A trip to New York City, paid for by the bridesmaids.

"I didn't really get mad about it at the time," Colley says. "It wasn't until after, when I started adding up all the receipts, and it was like, 'Whoa! I spent like $1,300!' "

Shelling out so much time and cash can make even the most devoted amiga wonder: Are brides pushing their bridesmaids too far?

"I think, certainly, a lot of them do," says Elise Mac Adam, an etiquette-advice columnist for IndieBride.com.

Adding up the extras

The average cost of a wedding is $26,000, an increase of 73 percent in the past 15 years, according to Fairchild Bridal Group. Bridesmaids can expect to spend $1,000 to $1,400 to be in a wedding, experts say.

"It's not the dress that's gotten more expensive," says Theresa DiMasi, editor of Brides.com. More events — extra showers, brunches and spa days — add up quickly. The trend of the bachelorette weekend — an entire weekend of activities or, more commonly, a trip to Las Vegas or some other hot spot — ratchets up the cost.

Plus, as young people have spread out across the nation (and the world), wedding-party members have had to pony up more for travel expenses. And the mention of a "destination wedding" — on the beach in the Caribbean or in a vineyard in France — will cause any potential attendant to conjure visions of massive credit-card debt.

Shelley Dodd, a 27-year-old who has been a bridesmaid six times, was in her college roommate's wedding. She says she spent about $800 on the wedding and still got off comparatively lightly because of the short distance she had to travel for the party and wedding.

"You don't mind it, because it's one of your very best friends or your sister, but the cost is definitely something you've got to be aware of," she says.

Etiquette experts, by the way, say that all of Dodd's expenses, save the multiple shower gifts, are perfectly reasonable requests on the part of the bride.

Obsession with the blowout wedding

April Ragsdale, a certified wedding consultant, says she's seen the time commitment for bridesmaids increase considerably in the past few years.

"It's not the bridesmaid's job to help you address invitations or make the favors," she says, though many a bride magazine suggests often that brides "delegate" such tasks to friends and bridesmaids.

She blames the Western culture's increasing obsession with the "blowout" wedding.

Mac Adam says that she frequently comes across articles that encourage brides to add "traditional" tidbits such as brunches or extra showers to their wedding events — which aren't traditional at all.

"They call it 'traditional-esque,' " she says. The bachelorette weekend, she says, evolved from the idea of a simple luncheon, and today's $300 bridesmaid dresses started as simpler frocks made by family or purchased at a discount rate from a friendly retailer.

These increased demands leave many young women with an uncomfortable dilemma: Disappoint a friend by turning down her request to be a bridesmaid or empty out the bank account for someone else's special day.

"A lot of [brides] come with unrealistic expectations. Anyone who thinks that it is a sign of an insubstantial friendship that someone says 'I can't afford something' or 'That interferes with my commitment to my career' is asking too much," says Mac Adam.

Recently, Brides.com's DiMasi says, an acquaintance pulled her aside at a cocktail party and asked for advice: She had agreed to be maid of honor for a woman she'd known since early childhood but was balking at participating as the expenses mounted. Tickets for the cruise-ship wedding alone would be $2,500, and because she didn't want to go alone, the maid of honor was considering inviting — and paying for — a guest. She also wondered if she should host a bachelorette party.

"And she works on her own, so she was looking at taking a few weeks off work when she wouldn't get paid," DiMasi says.

A bride asking for that sort of extravagance, without having an honest conversation with her bridal party about their ability to pay, is, frankly, inconsiderate and irresponsible, DiMasi says. She says she encouraged the woman to first weigh the importance of the friendship and then talk frankly with the bride to see if they could come up with a way to ease her financial burden.

How to say no and still be nice

Both Colley and Ragsdale stress that saying no — whether to the entire idea of being a bridesmaid or to one particular demand — needs to be handled gently and tactfully.

"If this person has asked you to be in their wedding, they obviously think of you as a close friend, and you don't want to hurt their feelings," Colley says. She once felt obligated to decline an invitation because she thought the soon-to-be-groom treated her friend badly.

Instead of saying, "I think you're marrying a jerk," she just said, "I really can't afford it." Then she offered to pinch-hit where she could, a strategy Ragsdale recommends for any girl who wants to shimmy out of the wedding party. Offer to throw a shower, to put together favors or to help on the wedding day, Ragsdale says.

Colley says that her experiences have taught her that the bride might be cooler than you're giving her credit for being.

"Sometimes, it's the bridesmaids saying, 'Oh, my gosh, we have to do this. She wants us to do this' when, really, the bride doesn't care," Colley says.

And although brides do have a responsibility to not mistake their friends for paid staff, Colley says the bridesmaids will have much more fun if they remember that they need to support their friend, the bride — even if she is being a jerk at the moment.

"She might be acting crazy right now, but she'll get over it," Colley says. "The thing to remember is that your friend is under a lot of stress. Her whole life is about to change. It's not her job to hold your hand. It's your job to hold hers."

Within reason, of course.