Hi
I am due to be a bridesmaid in the summer.
i have been contacted by the bride to say she feels I have not been supportive enough or involved enough, nor helped her enough so she’s reconsidering whether it’s fair for her to have a bridesmaid who isn’t interested.
she said I had been distant on the hen do. I probably was a bit, at times. One of my work colleagues who I managed just died, he just went home and died, and it’s been very difficult, so I’m under a lot of strain at the moment. Plus I’m the only married one with kids who went on the hen do, and I don’t have much in common with 20 something uni students so I felt a bit odd one out. I admit I could have been bubblier.
bride has said I didn’t message her straight back about trying on my dress. I had messaged her on the Friday, she didn’t get back to me until the Monday, by which point I had travelled overseas with work. I don’t have much time when on business trips, so I didn’t respond to that until I saw her when I got home.
anyway- back to the not doing enough bit. I was asked to provide photographer and DJ recommendations, which I did on the same day as I did some research around local friends. She didn’t reply to my recommendations at all, or acknowledge them.
I have only been a bridesmaid once before, and I wanted to ask MN if I have fucked up here? What jobs, in the months before the wedding, do you think a bridesmaid should be doing? Should I have asked what else she wanted? I assumed she would ask me if she needed something (as indeed she did, and I responded and did the thing).
I will say, that for me, weddings are difficult, I planned mine in 6 weeks, to try and get married before my parent died. In the end, parent died the day after my wedding, having gone into a coma the day before. So when the bride keeps asking me how it felt to be married in the first few weeks, and how long it took to get used to the name change, I was vague and said “I can’t remember/not long”. Maybe that sounded disinterested, but in all honesty I thought vague was less of a mood killer than “well actually I was planning a funeral, and ringing a priest for the last rights, so I wasn’t really that bothered”. Perhaps I should have been honest. And yes, bride knows about my parent- we were friends back then, though actually
at my wedding she did leave early before the meal as she said she felt poorly.
so, what would you expect to do as a bridesmaid? As a bride, what did you expect of your bridesmaids? I want to measure how unreasonable I have been in being happy for her, but not actually helping organise her wedding.