Q I'm getting married in spring 2014 and I have just had a massive falling out with my maid of honour. She got engaged about a week before me and asked me to be her maid of honour so when I got engaged a week later, rather than asking her to be a bridesmaid (which was my plan), I asked her to be my maid of honour because she had asked me.
However, there are two problems. One, my fiance doesn't like her and, two, because there are five bridesmaids (including her), the symmetry of the photographs will be spoiled. I'd rather have four and ask my best friend from school to be the maid of honour now.
She is only my best friend at work and I think I have to take my fiance’s feelings into consideration. But she took the news really badly and was crying hysterically and hung up on me and I don’t know how to sort this out. Help!
Bride-in-distress
A Oh dear. There is a fine line between becoming slightly obsessive over your wedding day plans and morphing into bridezilla – that terrifying monster, feared and loathed in equal measure by all who have the misfortune to come into contact with her.
I’m afraid that your mother, sister, brother, batty aunt or fiance will never dare tell you that you have become this creature – so fearful are they of incurring your wrath – but I will. You need to take drastic action to remedy this situation immediately before it spirals even further out of control.
Beg for forgiveness
As regards your best work friend and maid of honour that you have effectively fired, for the love of God, call her up and beg for forgiveness.
Apologise profusely for being such a deluded self-obsessed bride-to-be, tell her that you momentarily lost all perspective, and then beseech her for an audience so you can apologise to her again in person, hug her and try to make amends, including inviting her to be re-instated as your maid of honour – if she’ll have you.
Up next are some honest conversations: first, with your fiance to establish what his issue is, and then attempting to facilitate a reconciliation between him and your best friend so that they can, at the very least, see eye to eye.
This stuff actually matters because your best friend will be your ally during your marriage and, with any luck, you will be married for a very long time. Some of those times will be dark and difficult and you will need best friends more than you can ever imagine possible.
Think too how your treatment of her is going to sour your working relationship which may run over the course of years (not the few hours which marks the length of your wedding relationship).
Wedding photos
Symmetry is what spoils a wedding photo, removing any spontaneity, imagination and emotion from it. And anyway, which is more important – photos or friendships? What has happened to your priorities?
Of course she is hurt, deeply, and no doubt reeling from shock at such selfish and inconsiderate behaviour.
If it is photographic symmetry that is genuinely the problem here, either get over it or get another bridesmaid to balance the numbers.
Don’t let a best friend down so badly over something so trivial and ridiculous. You won’t remember the symmetry or otherwise of the photographs but you will regret this appalling behaviour – as she might – forever.
You need to throw yourself into your work or something else instead (running?) to help distract you from this wedding mania and help give you some perspective.
Caught up in the minutiae
One of the real dangers about a big wedding day planned into a distant future is that we can get caught up in the minutiae of every silly little decision as though our lives depended on it whereas, in reality, none of it matters.
It is enough that you will have one day dressed up as a princess and be treated like one, but you absolutely do not have the right to behave like a princess in the six months leading up to your wedding, which is precisely what you are doing now.
The inadvertent result of such behaviour is that come your big day, you will be so overwrought and deranged and detail/
symmetry-focused, that you will have lost the attitude necessary to really enjoy yourself. Not to mention the good friends you will have also lost and/or alienated along the way.
Because, unless you have relinquished some of this crazy control freakery, you will have a massive sense of humour failure if the napkins are the wrong colour or the flowers not quite perfect, or your hair or your dress or the bridesmaids or whatever it is.
This will spoil things, not only for you, but for your guests who will pick up on all your unnecessary anxiety. It is actually all the little flaws of the day: the priest who gets a name wrong; the colourful unsymmetrical characters; the bride who laughs easily, looks relaxed and natural and at ease, that make for a great wedding celebration, not the one with the symmetrical photographs.
The Grit Doctor says: Get your s*** together woman!
Ruth Field is author of Get Your Shit Together and Run, Fat Bitch, Run
