Saying No to "The Dress"

The media has a major impact on certain parts of our lives in the way that it sets expectations and standards for our experiences. I ran across a show on TLC the other day that is a perfect example of this: "Say Yes to the Dress," a half-hour reality show about brides picking their wedding dresses. At first it looks harmless enough, akin to paging through a bridal magazine. Brides come in for appointments to try on dresses, model for the cameras, get advice from boutique employees on hand, and eventually comes the big moment: saying "yes" to a dress.

However, the further I got into the show, the more it made my blood boil. The featured fittings on these shows always become events, fraught with emotion and drama. Most of the brides drag large numbers of family and friends into the boutique with them. The unspoken assumption is that they can't settle for any old dress, but they need the perfect dress to make their big day truly special. Sure, lip service is paid to financial considerations, but all the dresses we see still cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and are treated as the most important item on the bride's shopping list. The wedding dress acquires a holy mystique, with the ability to inspire all kinds of familial strife and tensions. The episode I saw had a bride and groom clashing over the style of the gown. She wanted something form-fitting. He wanted a poofy princess dress. Their clashing visions were played up to ridiculous extremes, and spun by the show as an early test of the couple's ability to compromise.

Now, I fully understand that the choice of wedding dress is very important to a lot of brides, and picking one is a valued part of the whole experience of putting a wedding together. And I also appreciate that weddings are big, momentous events that tend to attract lots and lots of drama. However, all the wedding shows I've seen, including "Say Yes to the Dress," treat the weddings like life or death experiences that require months of planning, ridiculous budgets, and a list of things that you absolutely, positively have to do in order to have the best experience possible. Sure, you can go get married at City Hall in a pantsuit, but that would be denying yourself the opportunity for the perfect fairy-tale day that you'll cherish for years and years to come. It's the message we've all been fed since we were kids: a wedding means the white dress, the dapper suits, the bouquet, the rings, the big venue, the reception, the showers, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, the dancing, the alcohol, and the multi-tiered cake.

A show like "Say Yes to the Dress" is another insidious piece of marketing, adding another stop on the way to the wedding. Now the wedding dress boutique appointment has become another oh-so-special event that a bride-to-be shouldn't deny herself. It becomes yet another focal point for potential disappointments. It becomes something else to worry about when you already have too many things to worry about. The show hit a nerve with me personally because I got married last year and encountered a huge amount of pressure to conform to the typical wedding narrative. The scary part was, a lot of the pressure was coming from me, from my own internalized ideas of what a wedding should be. It took some significant time and effort to figure out what I actually did and didn't want to do, and I ended up foregoing many things that people running these wedding shows would have been aghast that I had skipped.

And the dress? I don't like traditional white wedding dresses, but I decided to get one in order to look nice for the pictures that would be circulated among all of my relatives for the next few decades. I visited exactly one boutique, without an appointment, before deciding this approach wasn't for me. Instead, I went to a dress outlet store with some girlfriends, tried on the five styles of wedding dress that were available, and picked one. The process took an hour, and the dress cost me $200, including the dry-cleaning. I spent more on hair and makeup. I spent more on the flowers. The dress was not the perfect dress, but it did what I wanted it to, which was to make me look like a typical bride for a few hours that everyone could take pictures with. I'd have rented the dress if I could have, because now all it's doing is taking up closet space.

I'm not saying that nobody should buy an expensive wedding dress, or that you shouldn't enjoy wedding shows. I'm pointing out that nobody is obliged to say yes to the wedding dress experience that TLC is pushing or even any wedding dress at all. And I'm suggesting that it's a good idea to ask yourself why you really want something before spending thousands of dollars to make it happen.
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