How Do You Deal With a Bridezilla Either? Eh, No One Really Knows

The scariest thing about a bridezilla is that anybody can become one. She is the urban legend lurking inside all women of a certain age. Get on one knee, say her name three times, and she will appear asking how you could possibly confuse eggshell for ivory, are you stupid? She is demanding and rude to family and strangers alike. She treats friends like employees and wedding vendors like customer-service chatbots. She screams for the moon and, when presented with a painstakingly curated crescent, will insist she specifically asked for the sun.

We’ve all heard the stories, mostly from Reddit. (The r/Bridezillas sub-Reddit attracts over 190,000 weekly visitors and more than 2,000 comments and posts per week, and those numbers don’t include the dozens, if not hundreds, of popular posts about bridezillas on other sub-Reddits like r/weddingplanning or r/AmITheAsshole.) There are tales of brides barring guests from wearing scented lotions and perfumes lest the smell interfere with the “custom wedding scent.” Others speak of brides who, afraid of being “overshadowed,” make confusing last-minute requests like asking a tattooed friend to sit out of wedding pictures. (This particular request came via text the weekend before the wedding; the friend was meant to be a bridesmaid.) In the most popular posts on the r/Bridezillas sub-Reddit, which invites people to “share the chaos, vent your stress, or just revel in the drama of weddings gone wild,” rarely does the bridezilla have one simple, straightforward request. It is usually a compendium of demands that start small and devolve into absurdity. Did you hear the one about the bride who wanted to straighten the curls of an 18-month-old flower girl despite the mom’s repeated refusal? What about the one who demanded a bridesmaid dye her hair because her natural red color “clashed with the wedding palette”? How about the one who asked each bridesmaid to contribute hundreds of dollars to her wedding-dress fund? Often, the advice offered in the comments is some variation of the same message: The bride is being crazy, don’t go to the wedding.

Of course, it’s worth noting that few, if any, of these posts have been verified to be true. (And there are plenty I hope are actually fake.) Regardless, the internet doesn’t seem to mind forgoing factual details for dramatics. In fact, some of the most popular TikToks tagged #bridezilla recount the most absurd and popular stories from Reddit or Facebook groups. The #bridezilla feeds on itself.

The term “bridezilla” has been around since long before the advent of Reddit snark. A 1995 Boston Globe story about a new wedding-advice book, The Bride Did What?!: Etiquette for the Wedding Impaired by Martha A. Woodham, includes the earliest record of the word, defining it as “the name wedding consultants bestow on brides who are particularly difficult and obnoxious.” Nearly a decade later, WE TV debuted Bridezillas, which ran for ten seasons, took a five-year hiatus, then came back in 2018 for three more. The reality series followed brides from wedding planning to wedding day, highlighting their worst moments along the way. In one episode, bride Valerie smashes a cake, insisting it wasn’t the flavor she asked for. (It was.) In another, bride Arielle tears down the existing patriotic décor at her wedding venue because it doesn’t fit her color scheme. The venue was a local American Legion. Her wedding colors were “purple and zebra.”

But what if the bridezilla is causing you financial ruin along with emotional distress? Dear Abby recommends cutting your losses and stepping down from any involvement in the wedding. What if the bridezilla is your sister and you’re the maid of honor? Advice columnist Dear Annie says the bride doesn’t get “carte blanche” to do as she pleases at the sake of her family’s generosity: “You’re allowed to protect your time and energy.” Sherry Kuehl, who has offered advice as Snarky in the Suburbs for 12 years, says she often answers letters about difficult brides. “These letters are usually from bridesmaids and mothers of the brides,” she tells me over email, noting that letters from bridesmaids are usually about a bride’s expensive or over-the-top requests. However, “mothers of the brides are usually seeking advice about how to tell their daughters they’re being spoiled brats.”

For those seeking advice, the “bridezilla” label is a forgone conclusion. Mothers of the brides are not asking if their daughter is acting like a spoiled brat. They aren’t questioning whether their priorities for the wedding are aligned, why they might not be. The option to have a conversation is bypassed, and a confrontation becomes inevitable. “MOH [maid of honor] said I was a bridezilla but I don’t think I am?” writes one redditor bride. When the bride asked the friend for clarification, her maid of honor said she was too “high strung.” “I would 100% change my expectations or behavior,” the bride writes, “but I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong.”

A bridezilla doesn’t have to be a woman — see: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — but it makes sense why she usually is. If a bridezilla is someone making incessant demands about her wedding, she must be heavily involved in the planning. And who is thought to be responsible for the lion’s share of the planning if not the bride? After all, this is her most special, important day. A day that comes with weighty societal pressure, a personal reckoning with performed gender roles, and, on average, a $36,000 price tag. “They don’t come out of thin air,” one bride on TikTok says of bridezillas. “It definitely is people pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing us to this point.” (Unsurprisingly, groomzillas have far less representation in popular media.)

Among the many #Bridezilla posts from friends and family who lived to tell the tale are a significant number of messages from brides themselves. Sometimes they’re seeking advice on family frustrations, financial concerns, or vendor drama; these posts tend to boil down to one question: Am I being a “bridezilla”? (Sometimes the answer is yes. Often, the person asking for a gut check on their own behavior isn’t the one who needs advising.) “I’ve seen many a level-headed woman lose their shit in the thick of planning a wedding,” says one TikTok.

Sometimes, the bride is a self-proclaimed “bridezilla” — women who say that, in hindsight, the stress of the day got the better of them, and that they’d do things differently now. Kuehl herself is one such former bridezilla. “Now, the mother of a 25-year-old daughter, I would have told myself to chill out,” she says, adding that she’d have expressed more appreciation for her own mother who “was amazing and planned a wedding that was absolute perfection.”

I asked a dozen different friends and family members for their bridezilla stories. (A bravery on my end because they’d all attended my wedding several years ago.) Most said they didn’t have any, but the ones who did all told a similar story: A friend of a friend was in a wedding where the bride made ridiculous (often expensive) demands and/or acted inconsiderately. They had a fight, and now the two of them don’t talk anymore. Or they went on like nothing happened and still haven’t talked about it to this day. The latter seems to be as close as a bridezilla story ever gets to a happy ending.

It’s been a while since I was in the thick of it, but I don’t remember wedding planning possessing my every thought. However, I do remember asking myself (and my now-husband, and probably anyone who would listen) the same question each step of the way: How much should I care about this specific detail? Weddings are expected to be all-consuming, especially for the bride. Care too little and you’ll throw a shitty party in front of everyone you love. Care too much and everyone you love will shit-talk you by the open bar. (You are going to have an open bar, right??) She may become a problem all her own, but the bridezilla is a symptom of navigating this delicate balance. Even if this doesn’t excuse any and all destruction in her wake — and, to be clear, it shouldn’t — it should at least re-humanize the bridezilla.

“My least-favorite thing about the ‘bridezilla’ term is people try to single you out from your fiancé,” one bride-to-be says in a TikTok. “Like, I didn’t make that decision alone. We both made that decision, so you can talk to him, too.” Beyond over-the-top bad behavior, no one seems to agree when a regular bride becomes a monstrous one. Is she a bridezilla, or is she detail-oriented and very organized? Is she being a bridezilla, or is someone else trying to make the wedding day about themselves? “Are you being a ‘bridezilla,’” one wedding planner asks TikTok, “or are you trying to express your autonomy while trying to undergo one of the top-five most stressful life events that you’re going to endure?” Someone ill-equipped at handling stress on a good day probably isn’t going to thrive under the pressure of, say, a wedding. Likewise, a relationship that avoids conversations about everyday conflicts will have a hard time surviving major conflicts, especially if they arise during a stressful life event. Perhaps the real question is not how to handle the bridezilla, but who created this monster in the first place?