I have stumbled upon a new emotion and I am not sure what to call it. You love your friend who is getting married, would do anything for them but want to kill them on a regular basis. Most would call this some sort of latent form of bipolar disorder, but I call it the wedding experience. I have discovered that during the wedding planning process it is more important than ever to try to maintain a normal friendship. One would think this is very easy, but on the contrary, you would be amazing how ever conversation eventually ends up having to do with the wedding. While I love to help and am the MOH (which I know take to mean “Most Overused Helper” ) there has to be some semblance of normalcy. The wedding hysteria is a temporary situation and the friendship will go on, but if you don’t maintain part of  your normal friendship separate from the wedding you may find a void with the bride in the future as she will no longer have the wedding to talk about.

So, why am I at wit’s end with my bride right now you ask? Well it actually has nothing to do with her or the real wedding “stuff.”  It’s her family who are intent on giving her a nervous breakdown before the wedding.  The bride is a people pleaser and cannot say no to anyone. This is exacerbated by the fact that her family is taking advantage of her good nature to steam roll her.  Trying to add guests at will to both the wedding and rehearsal dinner, making drama where drama need not be, and generally creating a chaos in her brain which spill out on a regular basis in the form of emails, phone calls, texts and chats with/to me. While I want to help her, my personality is so different from hers, that I find my advice not only goes by the wayside, but makes it more glaringly apparent that she cannot stand up for herself. This is a source of frustration and sadness for me, but there is not too much I can do about it except listen.

The family dynamics between the bride and grooms side and the subsequent lack of support is stunning considering how happy they are that the two are getting married. I guess that should make me wonder if they are really that happy for them.  While I am annoyed at how obsessive the bride has become and how we can’t have a conversation without the wedding coming up, I do feel truly bad that not only can she not stand up for herself, but that the families are so whole-ly unreasonable. I am pretty sure she is starting to wish they had eloped.  She said to me the other day “I can’t wait until the wedding is over.”  Good grief, me neither. (While silently noting in my head that this is only the beginning of the family dynamics that will continue throughout their marriage)