Why weddings stress me out

I am not talking about my own wedding here, though I am sure that when the day comes, I am going to be stressed as all hell. But attending someone else's wedding shouldn't be stressful! Should it?

For someone who (up until recently) was unemployed, a wedding can certainly be stressful. Especially when that wedding involves expenses like flying to Johannesburg. For that same person, being given the honour of bridesmaid (not maid of honour mind you) is even worse. I am sure that being a bridesmaid is an amazing thing, I am sure that when the day comes to stand in front of the crowds beside a close friend, all the stress will be forgotten as you realise that all the hassle was worth it. I am sure that it is going to happen. But it doesn't stop the stresses from seeping in – the stress of having a dress made (particularly when you are the only bridesmaid from out of town and happen to live in a small town where dressmakers are either hard to come by or not very good), the stress of finding the right pair of shoes and the extra expenses including the buying of that dress and those shoes as well as the hair and makeup on the day. Just the idea of these things stresses me out, nevermind actually having to live through them.

Now picture this – you are such a bridesmaid. You manage to find a dressmaker in your small town to make you a bridesmaids dress that will suit the bride's exacting standards. You have been given material and a picture of the dress that is supposed to be made, along with instructions of how the dressmaker should go about making it. You give these instructions to said dressmaker along with the material well in advance – a month and a half before the wedding, just to be sure that it will be made on time. You don't want to stress unnecessarily of course, and planning ahead means that things are less likely to go wrong. Doesn't it?

A month later, you have not heard from the dressmaker. It is now two weeks before the wedding, and you really are starting to stress. Surely you should have been called in for a fitting by now. You decide to visit the dressmaker and find that she hasn't even started because she got the date of the wedding wrong. She wrote down that you need to get the dress on the wedding day, rather than two weeks before as you had requested. Cue the rushing dressmaker trying to get the dress done in time and making fatal errors to the dress as she goes – cutting a slit down the side of the dress, making it too short, not using boning, making the jacket entirely wrong so that there is a gap between the dress and the jacket which would be unacceptable in a synagogue. Oh, did I mention that this is a religious affair that you are attending? And that the dress needs to be worn in a shul and therefore really needs to be right so that there can be no cleavage and no inappropriate showing of skin? I didn't. Well now I have!

The day before you are supposed to leave, you are summoned to the dressmaker and told that your bridesmaid gown is complete. You breathe a sigh of relief and fork over the R550 (cheap for a dressmaker, but is the discount really worth the stress?) and run off without trying the dress on there and then because you need to get back to work. When you try on the dress in the evening, you find that none of the mistakes have been remedied and the dress is a disaster. You phone the bride, practically in tears, and are assured that the dress can be fixed when you arrive in Johannesburg. Your fears are qualmed, but only slightly.

On the day that you are supposed to leave for the airport, you get lost trying to find the friend's house where you are supposed to leave your car. You are left driving around a city that you don't know, shortly before you are supposed to be boarding your plane, and your Google Maps is not working the way it should (stupid Google Maps!) Okay, so you end up making it to your flight on time, but that doesn't mean that the experience wasn't stressful.

On arrival in Johannesburg, you inform the person who is supposed to pick you up that you have arrived. You give them fair warning (considering that they already know that you are coming and when) by sending them a message the minute that the plane lands. You are supposed to catch the Gautrain and diligently do (having paid R115 for the experience). You then find out that the person who was supposed to pick you up completely forgot that you were coming and made other plans. Sure, he changes his plans to pick you up at Sandton, drives you back to the place where you will be staying, gives you a brief tour, but then he is out of there, leaving you without transport in a city that you have only been in twice before and an area that you have never been in at all.

Suddenly you find yourself rather hungry and you start scouring the apartment for food, only to find a fridge filled with random vegetables, a bar of expensive chocolate and just about nothing else. Okay, you say to yourself, so I will walk to find something to eat. When you tell a friend that you plan to do this, she gasps in horror. Walk? Around Johannesburg? Are you crazy?!?!?!?! So apparently I get no food.

A night out on the town with the girls certainly relieves some of the stress as you dance and party the night away, and so does a day shopping with a good friend (who certainly relieves some of the stress of trying to find a pair of the perfect shoes.) But then, after such a day of shopping, you arrive at the apartment you are staying in to find that there is no electricity. Not only that, but your cellphone is dead and so are both of the laptops in the house, meaning that there is no way to charge it! Not to worry, I can always read. There should be, oh, an hour or so of daylight left. Oh, wait! Forget that. Light is gone and it's pitch dark. No way to read now. No way to eat either. Good thing I had a big lunch. And where is that person you are supposed to be staying with? At his girlfriend's place, and most likely not going to be coming home. Queue panic attack as you start hearing noises that prevent you from doing the one thing that you figure you can do in this situation – sleep. After a few hours of panicking, you somehow calm yourself down enough to fall asleep, and wake up hours later to find that you are still in one piece and the electricity has come back on, leading everyone to believe that you were crazy for believing that you would be robbed and murdered in your sleep, even though they all warned you about the dangerous place that Johannesburg really is and how you can never be too careful.

You awake the next morning, glad to be able to charge your cellphone, and lounge around the house for a few hours while waiting to be taken to another dressmaker to fix the disaster that is your dress. You then get informed, a short while before you are supposed to leave, that this other dressmaker does not have time to fix anything, and that nothing can be done about your dress. You will just need to go as is, disaster and all. Thoughts cross your mind, thoughts planted by your mother, of finding another guest and relinquishing the honour of bridesmaid. You voice these thoughts to the bride, but they are quickly shot down with reassurances that she would have you as a bridesmaid even if you went naked, This leads to discussions about how guests and Rabbis would react to seeing a naked bridesmaid, and slowly but surely, your fears are qualmed once again by the healing power of the bride's common sense.

It is now the day of the wedding, and you wake up from a fairly restless nights sleep (you were tossing and turning thinking about the wedding, about your hair (which was done yesterday, but is unlikely to look the same in the morning) and about ten million other things that have no bearing on this event at all. You awake to find that there is no electricity, once again, and that the GHD that you borrowed from the neighbour will be completely useless in this instance. And, horror of horrors, your phone is practically dead, once again, and it will be difficult to find another way to straighten your hair which, as you guessed, is not looking all that lovely. Cue your apartment person coming to the rescue, taking you to his office and allowing you to spend an hour straightening your hair at his desk while he attends a meeting, before dropping you back at home. You put on your makeup, you tidy your hair, you slide into that awful dress and suddenly, you are ready to go. It is time.

You arrive at the venue in what you feel is your awful attire, and are immediately assured by everyone that you look beautiful. Sure, the dress isn't perfect, isn't what it's supposed to be, but it's not quite as bad as you made it out to be, and it certainly wasn't worth forfeiting the honour of bridesmaid. You wander through gardens, you pose, you mingle and gush about how gorgeous the bride is, how proud you are, how happy you are and how much you are looking forward to the wedding, even though you are still not quite convinced that it is going to go off without a hitch. And then you are whisked away to the synagogue, and it is all happening so fast – one minute you are being blessed by the bride, the next you are walking down the aisle ahead of her, standing beside her as she circles her husband-to-be, watching as she grows up before your eyes – those eyes that are welling with tears of joy that can barely be suppressed. And then it is over. With the breaking of a glass and a hearty mazeltov, they are married. Or has it just begun?

This is when the celebrations truly begin. You are swept into a room filled with people and filled with more food and drinks than you could possibly imagine. You don't know where to start, so you follow the other bridesmaids, do what they do, eat what they eat and sit where they sit. The speeches start, first the bride's brother, then the groom's, then the groom himself, stumbling over his words because he is so happy, so completely stunned that this day has come, that the bride is actually his and his alone. More ridiculous amounts of food arrive at the table in phases, and there is dancing, celebrating, chittering and chattering until, around midnight, you find yourself on the dancefloor with the bride, the groom and few others, most of the crowd having dispersed. And it is truly over. The last guests kiss the bride (or groom) on the cheek, share hurried hugs, give their best wishes for the millionth time tonight and disappear into the night to their homes, to the clubs, to wherever it is that they want to go after midnight on a Wednesday night.

Suddenly, all the stress that you felt for the last two months is gone, is lifted off your shoulders. The wedding went off without a hitch. The dress, which was pretty damn bad and kept falling off throughout the night, was not quite as bad as you had imagined or as it could have been. The ordeal is over, and it was worth every second of stressing to see your darling friend getting married.

Gina and Joel – here's hoping that the rest of your life together is as wonderful and exciting as your wedding day was.