When Jon proposed in a bookstore last summer, I slid my hand into his and said “yes” as readily as I would any question posed by a beloved friend.
We already knew we’d be in one another’s futures, but not necessarily through marriage; we had shared our reservations in the past about ceremonial traditions and the value the marriage institution holds. Still, I’m British and he’s American, so our hands were tied in many ways. Being wed would enable us to continue building the life we wanted together. As we emerged into the bright afternoon from that aisle of novels stacked floor to ceiling, contentment settled over us.
Yet that peace was soon shaken when the chatter and expectations quickly followed. Our friends’ opinions had been steadily rising for the course of our relationship, and like the onrush of water above the brim of an overfilled bath, the time had come for their views to be shared with gusto.
“What’s your plan?” someone asked me two days after getting engaged. “Have you set a date yet?” It took me aback; how could I explain that in the past 48 hours, I hadn’t begun project-managing a wedding?
“Were you surprised?” almost everyone asked. I’d always reply, “Completely.” I felt compelled to offer people this narrative, abstruse as it was, when actually, I wanted to say, “Not really. We’ve been together for almost five years and discussed marriage at length.” I was leaning into a stereotype that’s typified proposal stories for decades. It’s what those around me expected, maybe even wanted.
Though many of these remarks were also addressed to Jon, most were directed at me, especially the ones regarding appearance. “You will look gorgeous,” several people said to me, in a tone that hovered between a question, observation, and demand.
Yes, I was getting married, but I told myself appearing gorgeous while doing so was irrelevant. Initially, I was able to brush off people’s comments. But before long, my thoughts started clinging to them: How will I look on the day?
It wasn’t the first time I’d begun viewing myself like a science experiment. In high school and during my undergrad years, I’d dabbled with various fad diets. I had restricted my food intake, counted calories, and felt a pang of satisfaction when my hip bone brushed against a forearm. Once, during a game of charades at a friend’s house (millennials know how to party), I attempted to act the movie Castaway to a group holding cups of liquor by lifting my tee shirt, sucking in my stomach, and popping out my ribs; in response, someone yelled, “Sexy!” I watched in the mirror as my body grew smaller during those years, along with the bodies of many women I knew, and I felt at ease knowing I was slotting into a popular idea of beauty. I can appreciate now how dangerous a path this can be.
Now, in my early thirties, new insecurities have emerged. I have a heightened awareness of beauty products that promise to “reverse the signs of aging,” and of friends who have frozen their foreheads with Botox.
The demands of society regarding how a woman should look on her wedding day can stir up likewise alarming behavior. My friend, who married a few years ago, was out for drinks a month before her wedding, with four of us sitting on high leather stalls in a bar playing low music. She gleefully shared details about her upcoming nuptials and explained how the dress she’d ordered was too small, but she was working hard to lose weight to fit into it.
A silence fell over the table, and perhaps to keep things light with a bit of dark humor, she stirred the red straw in her drink and added in a deadpan voice that her dream, more than anything, was for someone to take one look at her on the day and think, “Oh, someone just give her a sandwich!” as she floated around waif-like in a fabulous dress, pretending only to see admiration in their eyes.
I’d never waste my time on that when I got married, I told myself.
Therefore, I was more surprised than anyone when I, too, started to scrutinize everything about my own wedding. Jon and I settled on having a courthouse ceremony in Los Angeles, informal and intimate, with only our close family in attendance. We stumbled across photos of a courthouse in Beverly Hills that looked spectacular, and my imagination whirred to life: Us having our picture taken on the impressive steps, me before a magnificent mid-century building at golden hour. It looked perfect. I began researching dresses, sending images to my mother for her opinion; I went to the gym more regularly so the chosen dress would slide on, no problem; I took myself to Sephora and gazed at a saleswoman as she explained how lip liner would make my top lip seem fuller; I watched a YouTube tutorial about eyebrow laminating and seriously considered doing it.
I got into the swing of fashioning a wedding that would look stunning in the way I had seen done many times before. I cared. I did want to look a certain way.
However, when Jon and I drove to view our stunning chosen courthouse, a security guard told us we had the wrong building. The man cheerfully gave directions to the correct one around the corner, and soon, we arrived at a drab structure. What? I fumed inwardly as we entered the revolving doors to be met by a grumpier personnel. Jon noticed my downcast expression, reached for my hand, and said, “I’m excited to get married to you here. Wherever you want.”
All I could think, though, was that he must be having trouble with his eyes. I was fixated on our dingy backdrop — the gray brickwork, cracked floor tiles, and stale smell that would be our big day. The regret that might linger if we didn’t tick things off in the way we were supposed to.
I’d lost the point of why we were getting married, as I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.
The fault didn’t lie with the individuals around me for their uninvited comments, or with me, for reacting negatively and sharing my opinions right back. Rather, I determined it was the wedding industry creating my angst, a capitalist model worth $70.5 billion that, on average, extracts around $30,000 from betrotheds and produces the same emissions in a single day as four people churn out in an entire year. Wedding days as we know them today have been popular since the late 1920s, and I’d been exposed to the business model my entire life in various forms. My insecurity was a product of a well-worn societal system that pressures women to take part, look a certain way, and — heaven forbid — never complain if any of it feels inconvenient. I’d repeatedly seen others contend with these challenges, and I was falling into the same harmful trap.
Hadn’t I, too, upped my exercise routine in readiness to have some photos taken in a figure-hugging dress? It was all very well, me damning the circus of traditional weddings, but as much as I wanted to be above it, I was also giving myself over to the expectation to appear a certain way. And it’s hard to resist when everywhere you look, the industry is imposing prerequisites: #weddingdiet has 21.7m views on TikTok, personal trainers aplenty promote “bridal fitness packages,” and terms such as “shred for the wed” dominate popular media. In 2023, a poll of over 1,000 users of the wedding planning app Hitched revealed 84% felt pressure to lose weight before a wedding day, 85% compared themselves to others online, and 51% think their body image isn’t represented enough in wedding content. In the lead-up to my marriage, I realized I’d fallen prey to a bride’s murky pressures, slotting neatly into that 85%.
Plus, I’d become critical of others, primarily women, rather than admitting my insecurities. I finally recognized a plain old hunger to compete, to appear a certain way based purely on the slippery, subjective concept of beauty — just like when I’d pushed myself to lose weight to fit in with a crowd during my early twenties.
It’s helped, since acknowledging this impulse to look a certain way based on the expectations of a pervasive industry, to remind myself who is making money off my life, relationship, and body — because someone is profiting from all the fuss, and it’s not me. If I avoided my inner compass on my own marriage, I was anxious about the decisions I could fall into in the coming years — the ones that also didn’t sit quite right, even if I couldn’t immediately articulate why. Where would that leave me, floating somewhere I don’t recognize, my beliefs scattered like damp confetti? The thought alone made me queasy.
I made a choice. My wedding diet would involve a strict practice of trimming away the fat — all the expectations, uninvited comments, and supposed ideals, pound by pound — to see more clearly what I truly felt, in all my churning complexity.
Jon and I went ahead and booked the courthouse that we viewed, and I now can’t imagine getting married anywhere else. I’m embracing the route we have chosen and ignoring the expectations for how a wedding should look. I’m sure there’ll be times when I fall off the wagon and give in to old thought patterns — get up, do better — as with any diet, but if that happens, I will refocus, shut out the noise, and remember exactly what this experience means to me. Most of all, I’ll remember where to direct my frustration and that taking aim at others is the wrong target — because here I am writing about it, after all, my new lip liner stowed safely in sight, no better than the rest.
Emma Minor is a British writer based between Los Angeles and New York City. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and working on her first novel. Emma has written for the Fair Observer and Main Line Today and previously lived in Sierra Leone, running communications for the healthcare organization, Partners In Health.
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