Understanding Bridezilla

Here is a bride who had exactly the wedding she wanted. Photo by Ryan Timm Photography.

A funny thing about being a wedding planner is that people I meet for the first time, when they find out what my job is, often ask me whether I have to deal with a lot of bridezillas.  And they are always surprised when I inform them that pretty much all of the couples I work with are pleasant, easy to work with, and quite reasonable.  Because I have to field this question so often, I have put some thought into why it is that my clients are not, on the whole, anywhere on the bridezilla scale.  I’m still not sure I understand it completely, but I have some thoughts.

For one thing, I am the non-traditional wedding planner.  It’s not that I don’t believe in traditions.  I think traditions are lovely.  But I also encourage my clients to break tradition when it suits their purposes.  What does this have to do with being easy or difficult to be around?  It means that my clients are likely not comparing their wedding plans to some unreasonable standard created by the wedding marketing machine.  I think that that standard of perfection puts a lot of pressure on people planning weddings, which sometimes results in bad behavior–especially when there is any chance of something being less than “perfect.”  When you create your own standard for how you want your wedding to be, it takes a lot of external pressure off the planning and a lot of pressure off of you.

There is another sort of thing that goes on that also creates bridezillas.  This one is a little more complicated.  Many people raised female have been told (implicitly and explicitly) their whole lives that what they want doesn’t count, that other people’s opinions and wants are far more important than their own.  And so they often don’t learn (or don’t learn by the time they are planning their weddings) to say no to other people or to say yes to themselves.

I think what happens when someone planning a wedding can’t say no to other people is that they end up with a wedding that secretly they hate.  It might be “perfect” according to whatever standard they are using, but it isn’t what they wanted because they didn’t start out by saying yes to themselves.  And they never learned to say no to whatever other people are pushing.  They never learned to do what I always encourage my clients to do:  Have the wedding you want, even if it breaks all the rules.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that what happens under these circumstances is you end up with a woman (it’s almost always a woman) who is miserably unhappy about the perfect wedding she is planning, and she takes out her misery on anyone in the vicinity.  And that is one thing we would call bridezilla behavior.

So, here is my advice to you if you are planning your wedding (no matter your gender):  Before you sign a single contract, sit down with your partner in life and talk over what kind of wedding you want to have.  Bring a planner into the discussion if you think that will help to clarify your thinking.  Throw out all the “shoulds” and “have tos” and “everyone does this-es.”  Decide how much influence you want your families to have over the planning.  And then start to make decisions about the details of your wedding.  If you are happy with your wedding, chances are you will make everyone around you happy about it, too.