Bride insists that all bridesmaids get tattoos for 'her wishlist,' SIL refuses.
Bridesmaids are expected to drain their bank accounts, travel for destination bachelorettes with rose gold-decorated hotel rooms, and even hold the bride's dress in the bathroom, but what about when the bride expects the wedding party to make more permanent sacrifices?
So, when a frustrated sister-of-the-ex-groom decided to share the tale of her brother's ex-bridezilla's insane wedding demands, the people of Reddit's 'Wedding Shaming' group were ready to pile on. Who doesn't want to think of their college friend's wedding every time they look down at their own wrist?
My sister-in-law required her bridesmaids get matching tattoos...
I have not had nearly enough opportunities to share the abominable clusterf*ck that was my brother’s fiancée’s bridal party. My brother was in the Air Force, met this girl near his base, eventually got his discharge, and moved back to be closer to home.
Because he’d met his fiancée while he was living away, I didn’t know her very well, just what he’d told me about her. But he was clearly in love and that’s all that mattered to me. I wasn’t the one marrying her.
We don’t have a lot of extended family and my brother and I have always been close, so as plans began to take shape my sister-in-law-to-be kindly invited me to join the wedding party as a bridesmaid, even though we didn’t know one another well.
I made it clear that while I was honored, she needn’t feel obligated, because I understood the bridesmaids were primarily her immediate family and close lifetime friends (a few sorority sisters, some gals from high school, and a favorite coworker were the others on her roster if I recall correctly).
But she welcomed me with open arms so I gladly accepted and tried to do my part to make the wedding exactly as she imagined. It turns out that was a taller order than I ever could have anticipated. As the date drew closer the bride began to make some pretty hefty demands. The maid of honor calculated how much her full wish list would cost and it came out to over $85,000.
And that wasn’t even factoring in the honeymoon. So I thought, “Whew, neither of them had jobs for most of last year, that’ll be a tough nut to crack. Glad I’m not my brother right now.” And kind of sat back on my heels gawking in amazement and looking forward to attending an $85k party for the first, and likely only, time in my life.
Now, my brother’s a hard worker, but he’s not rich. And his bride-to-be works part-time only. So I checked with him and asked if he was really prepared to spend that much or if he’d come into some money he didn’t tell us about or something.
He explained that his bride-to-be was one of those girls who’d always grown up dreaming of her wedding day and she was dead set on the notion that this was going to be the single best day of her life and nothing would ever top it, so they had to go all out. Basically what he was explaining to me is they were both blowing through their savings and accepting help from our parents in order to realize her fairytale wedding.
I thought that was dumber than a box of rocks but, hey, it’s their wedding and their life, not my place to boss them around. Considering the scope, the planning was becoming so momentous that the Maid of Honor would gather us every week or two for strategy meetings. I mostly stayed quiet at these and looked for straightforward ways to help rather than taking the lead on any particular areas. I let people who knew her better handle the more individualized aspects of planning.
As a result the big decisions, like where to have the bachelorette party or what kind of presents to get her, were usually decided by a close friend. Then someone would let me know, “Hey can you call this vendor and reserve X amount of these?” “Can you check with this day spa and see if they have availability for all of us?” “Can you look next time you’re at their place and see if she still needs a new dishwasher?” Etc.
I didn’t mind at all, because I knew I was contributing more doing the menial tasks than I would be trying to take on the creative end, as I really didn’t know her all that well. But I was quickly taken off even doing that much, because my sister-in-law-to-be insisted I request military discounts from all the vendors and stores—even though they were items for the bridal party, paid for by us civilians—and she (the bride) has never served in the military.
So I felt kind of uncomfortable reaping the benefits of the discount when no service members would be utilizing the products. The bridal party (none of who served either) got frustrated with the extra money that kept appearing on my invoices due to my lack of willingness to request military discounts, and I was demoted to basically an audience member/cheerleader. Frankly, fine by me. This whole thing had really started eating into my time.
If you’re wondering how so many meetings and so much money could’ve gone into our end of planning this wedding when surely they had a wedding planner — it’s because on top of the ceremony itself — there were about five separate “bridal parties” scheduled, including the bachelorette party. There was a spa trip, there was a big celebratory clubbing night after she went dress shopping, there were all these celebrations that had to be just so.
One of the hallmarks of the actual wedding ceremony was uniformity. We were all getting our hair styled the same (women with long hair we’re getting dramatic trims, ones with short hair were getting extensions out of their own pocket), everyone ordered custom length heels so we’d all be 5’4 (an inch shorter than the bride) on the day of the ceremony.
The two women who were taller than 5’4 agreed to crouch down an inch or two in photos and during the public facing moments of the ceremony. I thought the bride was joking about this until she had them start practicing it.
There was so much going on in terms of appointments I had to make for myself, parties I had to plan and participate in — and you know, my own life that I lead — that I basically just focused on getting my tasks complete and stopped tracking what was being put on the books. At a point when things really picked up at my work and with my kids’ schooling, I missed a few planning meetings. You’d have thought I’d bailed on testifying before Congress the way they reacted.
So one day I get a disapproving reminder text from the maid of honor telling me to be at a specific address at a certain time, coupled with a passive aggressive PS that she was only reminding me because I’d missed the last several meetings. I told her I would be there and she basically replied that I better be because this one was extra important, and couldn’t be made up later.
I arrive and find we’re at a tattoo parlor. My brother’s bride has a fair number of tattoos so I figured she was getting a new one to commemorate the wedding and the bridesmaids were somehow involved. I’d gotten an email about a “design” a couple weeks prior but hadn’t looked very closely, because that word gets thrown around a lot in event planning.
I’d just replied just said whatever she’d wanted was fine without opening any of the files. I realized maybe they were designing a custom tattoo for her? Made sense, a few of the other bridesmaids were also pretty heavily inked.
So we walk in and everyone is gushing with excitement. I thought it was sweet and I offered to take photos. Like I suspected, the bride was getting a tattoo. It was wedding rings styled like a pin on a map, demarcating the town in our state where they’d met and were now getting married, (so basically it was the image of our state with the rings positioned over the town in question) and text denoting their wedding date.
I thought it was cute and I was happy for her. But what happened next surprised me and made me slightly uncomfortable. She, her bridesmaid, and another heavily tattooed member of the bridal party, each sat in a chair, and had artists coming to tattoo them. I knew even as I was asking that it was no coincidence, but figured I had to ask. “Oh, are you guys getting tattoos today too?”
They laughed as though it were obvious and the maid of honor said, “Of course.” And worse, from the prep the artists were doing, they appeared to be getting them on their wrists (the same place as the bride) a highly visible spot, not easily covered up when you don’t feel like reminiscing about your friend’s wedding.
I thought, “Well, this is getting out of control. What if they grow apart later in life and aren’t friends with her? What if my brother and this chick break up?” But hey, their bodies, their choice. And they’d evidently been directly involved in the design, so they must be comfortable with the imagery. I figured I’d keep up with my so far winning strategy of staying out of it.
The win streak was about to grind to a halt. Just as I was about to retreat into the shadows on my phone (to Google “how long do tattoos take” because I wanted to know what kind of a wait I was in for), the bride called out...
“Us three are first. And I think you can go in the second or third round if you have a preference. No one except Julie has a time constraint.”
It took me a second to wrap my mind around what she’d said. And even still, I didn’t get it. I was like, “Sure, go where?” “Go next.” “Ok, at what?”
I wasn’t playing dumb, it just genuinely hadn’t occurred to me yet that this could really be what she meant.
The Maid of Honor, who was already getting pretty fed up with me even prior to this, whined, “You haven’t read any of our recent emails, have you.”
And I was getting pretty cagey at this point, wanting to be sure nothing was accidentally permanently affixed to me, so I was up front where I would’ve otherwise been tactful.
“No, I haven’t. Why, what did they say?” “We’re getting the tattoos today!” I was still lost. A kernel of realization was beginning to pop in my mind but I was still frantically searching for an answer that led to anything else. “Ok, gotcha. Great. So, do you want me to like, take photos or get you drinks, something like that?”
Finally realizing how out of the loop on the plans I was, the bride spelled it out for me: “No we’re getting the tattoo today. We’re all going to have matching tattoos. It was, like, in the top five items on my wish list.”
I thought she was joking. I hadn’t known her to exercise any real sense of humor to that point, but I still figured either she was joking, I was being hazed, or she was out of her mind. So I exclaimed, laughing, “Well keep wishing. I’m not getting a tattoo.”
I looked around at some of the other bridesmaids who didn’t have any tattoos themselves, and realized they were really going to do this. They were going to have one tattoo on their body in a highly visible location and it was going to be a kitschy momento of a friend’s wedding. Just to appease this woman.
Remember, some weren’t even her family, one was actually just a coworker! I’m guessing the bride was her boss, and that she didn’t know what she was getting into when she agreed, or she would have bailed at the outset.
So I turned to the bridesmaids who seemed reticent (because I had no issue with people who wanted to get it doing it, just because I thought it was royally stupid doesn’t make it any of my business) and said “You know, you don’t have to do this right?'
We’ve gone above and beyond as bridesmaids and if you don’t want a tattoo you do not have to get one. We can get temporary images or henna or, even, hear me out, not do this one thing on the list considering we’ve done literally everything else.”
The bride started saying something to the effect of, “You ungrateful b*tch. That’s it. You’re out of here.” But neither she nor the bridesmaid could leap up from the chair because, although the tattooing itself hadn’t commenced, they were doing some other sort of drawing on them to prepare.
The maid of honor started cursing me out, saying I’d been a downer from the start and it figures I wouldn’t want to “share in the tradition” or “make any sacrifices” and on and on (no mention of the good deal of money I’d spent to that point, was it not a sacrifice?)
I think the maid of honor was also preparing to cut her losses because she pretty quickly changed tactics from shaming me about not getting a tattoo to commemorate a bridal party of a woman I barely know, into trying to create an in-group/out-group dynamic that guaranteed my exodus didn’t contaminate any of the women having doubts.
I went back and forth with the maid of honor for a minute, but then the bride started crying talking about how I’d ruined everything by not getting the tattoo. Another member of the party cut in and said she might want to think about the tattoo for another day or two before going through with it—I don’t know if it’s because she was genuinely having doubts or because the whole situation was so awkward she just wanted an excuse to extricate herself—but I suspect a combination.
The bride and her maid of honor reacted with such shock and horror you’d think she’d said she was pregnant by the groom. They told her she was disloyal and scummy and what’s more, that if she didn’t do it now, they wouldn’t give her the design to use for getting it done later.
Luckily someone from the shop, the oldest person there so I think maybe the shop owner, cut in and said she couldn’t help but overhear and she wouldn’t let any of her artists work on someone who was clearly having doubts.
She decided that everyone except the three already in the chairs (because they came in totally confident, unlike those of us in the gallery) would have to come back another time. Cue hysterical ranting from the bride as soon as she got home about how I conspired to sabotage her wedding.
My brother stepped in for me and patiently explained, like an adult talking to a developmentally delayed toddler, that my sister can’t require members of her bridal party to get tattoos.
Her response was to accuse him of being “in on the sabotage.” I got a long, unsurprising, profanity laden, Facebook message from the maid of honor later that week informing me that I was out of the bridal party and “the worst thing to happen since Hitler.” (Yes, this came from a fully grown adult woman who holds a regular job and manages her own affairs.)
I didn’t respond. I kept my brother up to speed. And I could tell he was getting pretty fed up with the wedding planning too. The “run, hide, wait” strategy might be genetic because it was his response to her insanity as well as mine, and it was not passing the test of time. He swears she was nothing like this when they were dating or even when they were celebrating the engagement.
To his credit he did mention shortly after wedding planning began that she seemed to be changing for the worse. But still. I have a hard time believing all of this is wholly bridezilla syndrome. I got an update from my beleaguered brother that four of the girls did not return for matching tattoos, three who did backed out at the last minute when the guy who’d kicked us out before gave them a thorough questionnaire as to whether or not they were really up to the commitment, and one more actually got it done.
I’ll skip the rest of the gory details, though there are quite a few, and say the wedding day eventually came. The bride (or her minions) tried to sit me in the back at the singles table and she got into a shouting match with my brother—well, not really a “match” as he wasn’t shouting back—about ruining the day and disrespecting her wishes when he moved me, his sister, back to the family table to eat with him and my parents.
I let it go and tried not to mention this ordeal or my resulting feelings about her too frequently out of respect for my brother. They stayed married for three and a half years before lockdown forced them to confront the relationship’s underlying problems, and they finally divorced a few months into Covid.
Turns out it was not all bridezilla syndrome. He wanted to split everything 50/50 and make a clean break despite the fact that he’d earned 80% of the money during their marriage. Instead, she took him to court and dragged it out for months. It’s only just been settled and I’ve been having a ball re-telling this story as we celebrate. To be fair, I guess she will need some cash on hand. You know. For the tattoo removal.
The jury of wedding shamers couldn't get enough of this novel of suspense, entitlement, and how far bridesmaids will go to avoid confrontation outside of the group chat. Here's what people had to say:
snooper92 said:
You saved some of those bridesmaids from making a big mistake! Did any of the women who went through with it get their tattoo removed post divorce? Must be awkward having a permanent reminder of your friend’s failed relationship.
asiantorontonian88 said:
I hope whatever her divorce settlement amount is, he took off a military discount on top of that.
[deleted] said:
This is the story that just keeps giving. Lockdown was probably the best thing to happen to your poor brother.
replicantgirl said:
I have several tattoos, and wouldn't ever make anyone get anything, EVER. Especially anything that had to do with MY relationship. I don't even have anything to do with my relationship, and we've been together 11 years!
I'm sorry you and your brother had to endure ALL of that. Some people show their true colors after the marriage license is signed. She seemed to show them before, but just like I did with my abusive ex... your brother likely ignored the red flags thinking once the ceremony was over, things would be fine.
ColombineDuSombreLac said:
I keep thinking about the divorce, did the judge rule the 50/50 ?