My wedding was the worst day of my life
After one last kiss for the photographer, Laura* and her new husband Tom* waved goodbye to the assorted guests at their wedding reception. They were living in Hong Kong at the time, but had got married at a grand country house near her parents’ home in Hampshire. In the honeymoon suite upstairs, Tom helped Laura out of an ivory-silk dress that cost two months’ salary, made a joke about leaving the consummation of their marriage to the next morning, and fell asleep. As she lay next to her new husband, Laura burst into tears.
“I wasn’t expecting to have sex that night, but I was expecting to feel happy,” she says. “Part of the problem was that we had 180 people at the wedding, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 18 months. Before I walked down the aisle, I almost had a breakdown at the thought of everyone seeing me in this huge dress when I hadn’t spoken to them in so long.”
The reception was also far more stressful than she expected. “Every time I had a conversation with a friend, I found myself glancing over their shoulder to make sure everything was going smoothly and at no point relaxed into this day I thought would be perfect,” she says. “Getting into our hotel room and realising I hadn’t really enjoyed any of it made me feel like such a failure.”
It is often said that expectation is the enemy of happiness – if that’s the case then it’s a wonder anyone enjoys getting married. We’re slowly changing the narrative around long-term monogamy and parenthood, and understand that anxiety and depression can sit alongside love when it comes to life’s major milestones. And yet on a wedding day, we leave very little space for anything other than blissful happiness.
Hence the word “perfect” cropping up so much: the perfect day, the perfect dress, the perfect hair and the perfect first dance. Scroll through wedding planners in the UK and you’ll find many that include the word “perfect” in the company name, while Instagram is filled with posts from brides gushing about how every moment of their big day was magical.
Julia Carter, a senior lecturer at the University of West England, has completed a PhD in women's studies with a focus on weddings, and noted during her research that the word “perfect” cropped up more than nearly any other adjective in bridal magazines. “The wedding industry sells us this idea that we’re going to be an entirely different – and yes, perfect – person on the day we get married, as if weddings exist in a parallel universe,” she says, “one where introverts relish being the centre of attention, families don’t bicker and nobody feels a moment of shyness or insecurity. When reality impinges on this fantasy, people – and women in particular – tend to feel a lot of shame.”
The weight of expectation this one day now has to carry is a relatively modern phenomenon. While many of the traditions of a classic white wedding date back to the Victorian era, the mythology we’ve built up around them began in the 1980s at a similar time to the country-wide relaxation of societal rules.
“Before that, most couples had to get married in order to start a family,” says Carter. “Less emphasis was placed on the wedding because the marriage already symbolised the start of a new life. Today, couples will often be living together already, and many will have children, and the result is an absence of obvious external reasons to have a marriage. Therefore, the importance of a wedding in its own right becomes heightened. With the growth of neoliberal capitalism, the wedding market has flourished further, pushing the message that total happiness can be achieved through consumption.”
Increasingly extravagant
And consumption there is… Each year, around £14.7 billion is spent on weddings in the UK alone: £9.4 billion on the day itself, £3.2 billion on clothes, shoes and other products and £2.1 billion on travel and pre-wedding events. And the change has been rapid within one generation: millennial couples will often wear two or even three outfits over the course of one day, hire a videographer and photographer, get assorted live music for the ceremony, drinks and post-dinner party and hold the entire event in a grand stately home or hotel. And that’s excluding the hen and stag dos abroad, the mini-moon afterwards and the expensive honeymoon six months later. Contrast all this with the older generations, who likely had a church service, a simple reception and a holiday somewhere close to home.
“The expense today is significant,” says Carter. “People spend the equivalent of an annual salary on one day, and that’s one of the reasons why there is such a taboo around saying you haven’t enjoyed it – whether it is you who has paid for it or your parents.”
Parents, of course, are another factor. Venetia* and her husband Luke* were in their early 30s when they got married. They had been together for about six years and what they really wanted was a small registry office ceremony and a lunch afterwards, but pressure from their families led them to organising a traditional white wedding.
“We paid for the whole thing, but my parents insisted on overseeing the guest list, the wording of the invitations, my dress, the service, and even demanded my sister be my maid of honour,” says Venetia. “My dad’s speech was bizarre; he may as well have been speaking about a different person and I was so worried about everyone having fun that I didn’t really stop to enjoy it myself – not helped by the fact that nobody knew what to say to me other than comment on my dress.” Twelve years later and Venetia and Luke are still happily married and now have two children, but when they think back to their wedding, they are filled with regret. She says: “We spent our life savings on what was a bit of a crap night.”
Lonely and anxious
This seems to be a recurring theme. While researching this article, I put a message on Instagram asking people to contact me if they hadn’t particularly enjoyed their wedding and felt a lot of guilt admitting that. The response was overwhelming and, interestingly, the majority of women who wrote to me said that nothing notable had gone wrong, simply that they had felt surprisingly lonely or anxious and that looking back, the expense now felt obscene.
“I was so stressed about everything going perfectly the entire day that in the end I didn’t get to enjoy myself at all,” says Emma*, 36. “I hardly ate, drank, danced or spent time with my husband or best friends. A few years on and my husband and I are stronger than ever, but the day felt like it was more about everyone else than us. Most women say their wedding day was the best day of their lives – mine doesn’t even feature in my top 10.”
Carter explains this by saying that because we live in a post-feminist society – where women are told they have equality and no longer need feminism – there is little pushback against traditions that still nudge women into traditional gender roles. “No matter how they divide household labour the rest of the time, women are told it is right to become consumed by creating the ‘perfect’ day,” she says, “and the pressure is on them to achieve this: acting as project manager, event organiser and idolised object all at once.”
Some of this pressure is channelled into a pre-wedding obsession with appearance. Quite why marrying a man you love in front of friends and family requires a Disney princess-style transformation remains largely unexamined as women diet and exercise for months before the big day in an effort to be as thin as possible.
This is particularly difficult for the women who have recovered from eating disorders. Lila*, 32, is one of them. As a teenager, she developed bulimia, and after years of work she recovered by her mid-20s, but found planning her wedding surprisingly triggering. “All my friends and family were really sensitive,” she explained, “but moments like when my wedding dress designer said she’d cut the corset tight because I’d inevitably lose weight or when my mother-in-law literally took a piece of cake out of my hand the week before the big day made me feel really anxious – like my body was all wrong for what was supposed to be this fairy-tale time.”
Social media has also perpetuated the idea that the run-up to a wedding should be a blissfully happy period for a couple – type in the hashtag “nearly-wed” and be prepared for an influx of gushy adoration. That might be true in Instagram land, but in reality, staring at your intended with gooey lovestruck eyes can feel like yet another point on an endless to-do list.
“I don’t think not enjoying your wedding or the planning of it says anything about your relationship, unless it is the thought of the marriage that is making you anxious,” says Carter. “But what I have noticed is that divorced people are more willing to openly talk about not enjoying their weddings, thereby perpetuating the idea that the less happy you are on your wedding day, the less likely the marriage is to endure. The reality is that once divorced, idealised expectations are already breached – you have already transgressed, so you can tell the truth.”
Interestingly, nearly everyone I spoke to while writing this article was at pains to stress how good their relationship was; none of their regrets were about getting married, simply about how they did it. A New Yorker told me she wished the money she and her husband had spent on a big wedding had gone towards a once-in-a-lifetime trip. A lawyer said her country house hotel wedding made her feel like an identikit bride, while a man explained that all the focus was on his wife, not him.
I also got married recently and researching this piece in the wake of my own wedding has been interesting. For me, the day itself passed in a very happy blur but I found the run-up to it more stressful than I expected and I probably felt closer to my husband on the morning we got engaged than on the day we got married. “In the end, weddings aren’t really for the couple, they’re for other people,” says Carter.
*All names have been changed
