It was a bunch of little things. For one bride, it was the photographer, who bailed at the last minute. Then the company that was supposed to set up the chairs never showed up. Guests who hadn’t RSVPed rolled into the reception with their children. There wasn’t quite enough food. At another woman’s wedding, the coordinator ghosted mid-reception and her caterers dropped the cake. There was the wedding where the mother of the groom arrived wearing her own wedding gown; another wedding where the bride’s mother picked a fight seconds before her daughter walked the aisle; another where the couple hadn’t realized, until dusk fell, that the outdoor venue didn’t come with lights. As she took to the dance floor with her new father-in-law, yet another former bride told me, the DJ played “Pony,” by Ginuwine.
The brides knew these details were trivial. Often, the guests hadn’t even noticed — certainly, no one in attendance cared remotely about the lack of an audio guest book or that the custom cake topper was missing. They were in love and had gotten married, and that was the important thing. But after the wedding, some brides I spoke to couldn’t stop fixating on what had gone wrong. Worse: They couldn’t stop fixating on the fact that they were fixating. How could they be this upset about a wedding? “It’s embarrassing and stupid and not logical,” says Lindsay, a 32-year-old hairstylist, who spent her 2023 wedding feeling exposed and embarrassed by the onslaught of small mistakes. (Like everybody in this story, she’s been granted a pseudonym.) She had gotten distracted and hadn’t finished her makeup; at the reception, nobody really danced. “I’m acting like the wedding industry killed my dog, and, really, I just had a bad time. I shouldn’t feel this bad,” she says. That she does feel this bad only makes her feel worse. “It’s one day in the grand scheme of my life,” says Monica, a 31-year-old tech worker. So why couldn’t she get over it?
You are not supposed to feel pained by the thought of your own wedding. It’s the culmination of so much effort, so much time, so much money. Shouldn’t you just feel grateful that all these people came together for the express purpose of celebrating you? To feel lingering regret about the day’s events, haunted by your bourgeois disappointments, is not just a source of sadness but a source of shame: Either it’s your fault because you should have been able to head off any problems, or it’s your fault because you’re a bridezilla. Or worse: “It sounds like your love for your partner must not be strong enough to make the whole thing wonderful no matter what happens,” says Leigh, a 35-year-old teacher who got married eight years ago and still hasn’t completely moved on. It’s a feeling with nowhere to go. What are you going to do, complain about it to the people you made travel to come? And, as Leigh points out, “It is really not something you can talk about with people who are unmarried but want to be married.”
In the weeks immediately following her 2019 wedding, Monica found herself crying all the time. “I just cried so much. Every day after work, I would cry in my car commuting home,” she recalls. Her friends hadn’t shown up to help her get ready, and the ceremony hadn’t been set up, and at the reception the tension between the families had been palpable. Afterward, she had recurrent nightmares. “Going to my wedding and realizing that I forgot my dress or showing up to the reception and realizing I’d torn my skirt.” On her honeymoon, Laurel, a 34-year-old editor, started dealing with insomnia for the first time in her life. Objectively, the wedding had been lovely, she knew. But one of the speeches had droned on, and her husband had been so busy entertaining he’d missed dinner, and the next morning, her well-meaning mother-in-law texted her a series of wildly unflattering pictures from the day. She had felt beautiful, while it was happening, and now … “Woof, I wanted to vomit.” In the hotel room, “I lay in bed just listening to true-crime podcasts as the room slowly got brighter,” she says.
For some of these former brides, even being reminded afterward of the existence of weddings can make them feel mildly ill. “If a podcast comes on with a wedding theme, I just get this pit in my stomach and I skip it,” says Lindsay. “I avoid wedding talk with clients. I’m just constantly getting retriggered.” She has, to date, avoided writing her thank-you notes, which has become yet another source of shame. The first time Monica was invited to a wedding, two years after her own, she nearly bailed. Even now, five years after her own nuptials, she avoids photos of the day. There are a few hanging at her mom’s house. “We argued about it,” she says. “I try not to look.”
Annie, a 26-year-old ER nurse who got married this summer, is one of several brides I spoke to who sought out therapy to work through the emotional fallout. Her wedding coordinator had been replaced at the last minute and Annie’s meticulous instructions ignored. There’d been no way to stream the ceremony for her dad, who couldn’t be there, no high chairs set up for the guests with babies, no cake decorations, no plates or napkins set out with dessert. She couldn’t shake her sadness: It was a day she’d looked forward to her whole life, a day she’d always remember, and there weren’t any do-overs. And maybe her feelings weren’t actually irrational, the therapist suggested. What she was dealing with was a kind of grief. “When you’re expecting a child, and something goes wrong, you have to go through a grieving process,” the therapist had told her, and while this wasn’t the same thing at all, there were, the therapist gently said, certain similarities: She had been eagerly preparing for something that went sideways and would never get it back. “When you’re expecting a wedding — we put all this time, money, and effort into it — and you don’t get that? You have to go through a grieving process. You have to go through your anger. You have to go through your acceptance.”
Several of the brides I spoke to came to see their wedding snags as proxies for deeper-seated issues that, under normal circumstances, were easier to ignore. “I knew what my family’s dynamic was,” Monica remembers thinking immediately afterward, crying in her car. She’d known her parents were acrimoniously divorced, that her mother-in-law-to-be had strong and loud opinions, that her husband’s brother was “hot-headed,” that there was likely to be conflict, and still she had expected people could hold it together for one day. “I felt like I had been delusional.” For Lindsay, who didn’t feel like she belonged at her own wedding, the revelation was slower to arrive. She often felt she didn’t belong, neither in her own family nor with her in-laws, she realized. The wedding, she told me, “triggered some sort of deep childhood thing.” The bride who couldn’t stop obsessing over too-long toast found herself confronting her own long-standing perfectionism; the bride whose photographer had botched her photos grappled with her body image.
In the years after Monica’s wedding, there was a pandemic, her dad died, and she moved across the world. “At the time, I thought, This is the worst thing that could possibly happen,” she says, laughing. “But now I’m like, No, no, life can be so much worse.” She has toyed with the idea of some kind of splashy redo for a future milestone anniversary, which people love suggesting on the internet. It’s tempting, she allows. But “maybe it would be better for my mental health just to accept that the situation wasn’t what I wanted it to be and just move forward.”
Annie has no such doubts: Under no circumstances will she be doing any part of this again. “It was a show for everybody else,” she thinks now, four months after the event. “In hindsight,” she says, cheerfully and definitively, “we should have eloped.”