If you’re lucky, being a bridesmaid in a wedding is a lovely experience – full of fizzy fun and warm memories you’ll cherish forever with your friends and family. If you’re not so lucky, well, at least you’ll get a story out of it.
We’ve all heard tales about “that bride” (and even some bridesmaids) who lost sight of the real reason for the big day and acted a fool in the process. Although calling someone a bridezilla can be a tired and sexist trope, the truth is that many women fall into the trap of putting so much pressure on their nuptials that they make life miserable for those they care about. With the wedding industrial complex raging and expectations coming from all sides, even the most levelheaded bride can be one not-quite-right flower arrangement or seating chart snafu away from a full-on rage breakdown.
We at GLAMOUR put out a call for women to share the craziest bridesmaid experience they have ever had, and we got some doozies. Bridesmaids have been starved, kicked out, ghosted, and even stripped naked, all in the name of friendship. Here are their stories.
My sister-in-law (my partner’s brother’s now wife) chose me as a bridesmaid to even out the numbers, and on the morning of the wedding she had a lingerie party. They also invited my sister to the wedding and extended an invite to her to attend the lingerie party. It turned out that this “lingerie party” was also meant to be a place to share sex advice. Since the entire bridal party had been raised religious, and my sister and I were the only attendees who were married, we were the only non-virgins there to dispense advice. The bride was about to marry my partner’s brother, and she kept asking me for tips because she said maybe I knew something about what both brothers liked in bed.
The other ladies drank a little too much at the lingerie/sex-talk party. Two bridesmaids fainted during the ceremony later that day. The altar had stairs and I was the seventh bridesmaid on the bottom step. After the first bridesmaid fainted, the group looked almost like dominoes ready to fall. When the second bridesmaid fainted, the father of the bride caught her mid-fall before she hit the ground like something out of a movie. Thankfully, the two other bridesmaids looking green decided to sit down for the rest of the ceremony.
I was kicked out of a wedding because I started trying to get pregnant. The bride said the dresses she wanted wouldn’t look good on a pregnant woman. I was supposed to be the matron of honour.
This was my best friend from grad school. She had extremely expensive taste and was taking out almost six figures in loans and credit card debt to pay for the wedding. She expected £400 minimum per head from guests as gifts and only wanted cash. The invitations never went out, but I know this because at one point she planned to include that on the invitations. She also told me my husband wasn’t invited because she wanted me to focus on her that day but reminded me that I should give her £800 for a gift because we are a dual-income household.
It was actually a really sad example of how a truly lovely person can get sucked into the need for a picture-perfect, reality-TV-worthy wedding. In the end I didn’t end up getting pregnant until five years later, and the wedding was called off.
I was the maid of honor for my cousin at the first wedding I ever attended; she’s nine years older than me. To say she was a bridezilla was an understatement.
We went for manicures, pedicures, and waxes, and I was done first. My aunt, the mother of the bride, went to pick up wraps for us for lunch. I started to eat since we hadn’t eaten all day and I was getting hangry.
As I was eating, my cousin, a.k.a. the bride, asked me to feed her her wrap. I thought she was kidding, so I just kept eating. A few minutes later, she told me she wasn’t kidding and basically demanded I feed her the wrap since her nails were drying. I was pretty dumbfounded, but I fed her the wrap.
Luckily, this is something we laugh about today. Eleven years and three kids later, we still joke about how crazy she was, and she still can’t even believe she made me feed her that wrap, let alone that I did it.
As a bridesmaid, I personally think photos should be more about the bride and the groom. But for this wedding, the entire bridal party had to be there during the whole photography session. First, we had to hike up a mountain in 100-degree heat (in our dresses, heels, and hair and makeup, no less) only to find out we had gone to the wrong spot.
Even though most of us weren't in 90% of the pictures, we all had to just stand around and watch the photos while festivities were happening. I was sweating my ass off on a mountain, and worse, I missed the opportunity to eat. Luckily, I had brought a protein bar. The dinner was buffet-style, so my husband did grab me some food, but it was mostly cold by the time I got back to my seat.
Three weddings down, and I'm bowing out at the peak of my bridesmaid career because, really, who needs 27 dresses to figure out their limit?
I was part of a wedding where the bride fired all of her bridesmaids. This couple had moved to our area in upstate New York from California and decided to plan their wedding back in their home state. I was asked to be a bridesmaid late because one of her cousins backed out. In hindsight I should’ve said no, but I was young and dumb.
This bride wanted two of everything (two bridal showers, one in New York and one in California; two bachelorette parties, one in New York and one in California), and she expected the New York bridesmaids to fly out to California a week before the wedding to be able to attend all the second events. Additionally, the dress cost £250 before alterations and we were expected to pay for our own hair and makeup, and to pay to stay at the super-ritzy resort in Newport Beach where the wedding would take place. At one point the expenses were starting to pile up so much that we sat down with the bride and voiced our concerns. We were young and mostly broke, and couldn’t afford it all.
Eventually, the couple “decided to downsize” their wedding and demoted us from bridesmaids to guests. I won’t lie, me and all the other New York bridesmaids breathed a sigh of relief. We thought this was the end of it. Until she sent us a colour palette of acceptable coloured dresses we could buy to attend as guests. I rebelled and got a dress that had some elements of the palette, but not all of them.
In this wedding I was one of six bridesmaids. The wedding party also included a maid of honour and a matron of honour. One of my fellow bridesmaids was so upset about not being asked to be the maid of honour that she spent four months complaining constantly to everyone that she deserved to be chosen.
This bridesmaid eventually told the bride she had a choice. Either the bride could make her the maid of honour, or she would not be coming to the wedding. The bridesmaid ended up being uninvited. To this day she and the bride do not speak. It’s been nine years.
I was a bridesmaid in a completely lavish, over-the-top, glamorous New York wedding at the Plaza Hotel. No expense was spared and everything was perfect. The bride was my best friend from high school, and we had been close for nearly 10 years at that point. I was even a “surprise guest of honour” at her bridal shower because I had moved to Washington, DC, a year prior. At her wedding we danced to Tina Turner together and everything seemed fine.
Then she completely ghosted me. I never heard from her again. About a week after she returned from her honeymoon, I noticed her replying to people on Facebook and realised she was not replying to me on purpose. I sent her messages on Facebook Messenger and texted her (this was before other social media was popular), and no response.
To this day, nine years later, she’s never even acknowledged me with a like on a Facebook photo (although we are still Facebook friends). My husband and I, who was my boyfriend at the time, have ruminated on it for years. Did he accidentally say something bad? Was it because my dress ripped? We have had no communication and we have no idea.
The bride and I met in college and immediately connected. We supported each other through relationships, breakups, jobs — literally everything you experience in your 20s together. She was a bridesmaid in my wedding three years before hers. When I found out I was pregnant, I immediately texted her from the bathroom when I got the positive test even before I told my husband. I was so excited to plan her bachelorette weekend, her bridal shower, and then to travel to Las Vegas for her dreamy wedding in the desert.
It was a nice, small, intimate wedding. I have nothing but pleasant memories of the whole trip. After the reception dinner I went back to the house since my pregnant body was worn out after a few days in Vegas and I had an early-morning flight. Some of the other guests wanted to go out on the Strip to party more, but I turned down the invite to join them. I flew out the next morning and I let the bride know when I made it back home.
I messaged the bride when I knew she’d be back from her honeymoon and she never responded. I chalked it up to being busy after being out for her wedding and honeymoon, so I wasn’t taking it personally. Then she didn’t respond to texts or Facebook messages and went completely silent. If I did something, I was entirely unaware of my offense and she never responded to any messages from me.
My other friends were planning a baby shower for me a few months later and asked if I wanted to invite her and I said yes, give it a go. She politely declined and I have not heard from her since. She unfriended me on all social media after that, and it’s been years now and I still have no idea what happened.
I was a bridesmaid in my best friend’s wedding. We live in Dallas and the wedding was in Carmel, California, at a boutique hotel over the course of five days. The bridesmaid dress she picked out cost about £800 before alterations. All told, the wedding would cost around £3,250 for me to attend. It was 2003, and I was a 21-year-old college student. This was obviously something I could not afford.
I had a heartfelt conversation with my best friend, letting her know that I couldn’t make it work financially. I felt terrible. I cried. I was heartbroken. Her response was “Well, then I guess we can’t be friends any longer.”
She cut me off and hasn’t talked to me since then. We work in the same industry and anytime we run into each other, she pretends like I don’t exist. It still hurts my heart to this day.
About nine months after my college roommate’s wedding, she asked if she could have my floor-length eggplant-colored, thick satin bridesmaid’s dress “back.” This was despite the fact that I paid for the dress. She told me she was “feeling crafty and wanted to use it to make curtains or a headboard.”
I already had the dress set aside in a bag and had planned to send it to a non-profit that provides free dresses to high school girls for prom. But she insisted, and I relented. Eventually I saw it replacing a missing drop-tile ceiling panel in her basement.
The bride and I went to college together. The night before the day of the wedding, I was staying in a hotel room with the maid of honour and the bride.
Around 4 a.m. I started not feeling well. I went to the bathroom and threw up, and then I couldn’t stop throwing up. I threw up like five or six times in two hours. The bride woke up at 6 a.m. and excitedly came running into the bathroom to start getting ready for her big day. Instead she found me in a ball on the bathroom floor. She immediately ran out of the room, assuming I had the plague, and left the maid of honour to deal with me. She also told her mother, who came in and checked on me at 7 a.m. She brought me water and then told me to toughen up and get ready to get my hair and makeup done soon. I realised with horror they still expected me to be ready for the noon wedding.
I told the bride’s mother, “I don’t think I can do this.” She told me I had to “for the numbers.” She then told me she had Tums, and that if I don’t take the Tums (which I told her wouldn’t help me), I will ruin her daughter's wedding. She leaves and sends the maid of honour in to force me to take them. I refused, so the mother came back in and told me I had to take them. I did, and then proceeded to immediately throw them right back up.
The bride then came in because she heard I was being uncooperative. She told me she needed me to be in the wedding; otherwise it would be uneven. She said she knew I would feel better in a few hours. They left, and a few minutes later there was a knock at the door. I opened it and realised it’s the hair and makeup artist. They had sent her up to my room and told her I was hungover. She was horrified to learn I was just sick. She proceeded to do my hair and makeup in the bathroom. I would tell her to stop, I would lean over to throw up, and then she would continue curling my hair after I vomited.
Eventually the maid of honour came back and said I needed to come down to the hotel lobby for photos. I attempted to stand and fell, but the makeup artist caught me. She then put the dress on me and walked me downstairs where I clung to the maid of honour. In the lobby I was told to stand in the back row. After a few pictures, the photographer said I needed to sit because I was swaying too much in the photos. The bride was livid because she wanted to be the only one seated in the photos. She then told me to just lean on a chair but not actually sit in it, which I tried doing but failed.
That’s when the bride and her mother had a chat, and then the mother pulled me aside. “So you can’t do this,” she told me. “You’re too sick. We are afraid you’re not going to be able to walk down the aisle. So we’ve replaced you. My stepson’s girlfriend is the same size as you and can replace you.” Then she said, “So… we need the dress.”
She then proceeded to pull it over my head in the hotel lobby. I think she thought I had a slip on, or at the very least a bra, but I had nothing. I was naked. The mother freaked out. Thank God the front desk saw everything and got towels for me immediately. The maid of honour threw them on me and got security to carry me up to my hotel room.
I had to call my mum to pick me up. I was too weak and exhausted to drive home. Hotel security actually carried me out to my mum’s car, and I woke up in bed 24 hours later. My mum wanted to murder her mother. We are no longer friends and I was never given the dress back, even though I paid a lot of money for it.
This feature originally appeared on Glamour US.
