I've been a bridesmaid four times in my adult life. I've been asked five, but I turned down one girl. I'm pretty sure that's unheard of. Here's why I chose not to be a bridesmaid to the fifth girl.
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| This should be part of awkward family photos. |
Being a bridesmaid is a role I take seriously, which I'm sure we all do. Part of that means being a honest, loyal, good friend. It also means taking on all the financial responsibilities that is required of a bridesmaid.
The girl who asked me, asked me at the same time my Aunt Penny did. I knew I couldn't afford being a bridesmaid in both and Aunt Penny would always take precedence in this situation, so I told the girl I couldn't afford to be in both weddings and left it at that.
The catch is that there was a deeper reasoning behind choosing not to be a part of her wedding. Honestly, if it meant enough to be I would have found a way, and the money, to be in both weddings. The bigger reason that I chose not to be in her wedding was because I didn't see myself being her friend in the future.
I know that most of us usually have one bridesmaid that we lose touch with in our lifetime. It happens. The way that I see it is that that girl was an important part of your life at that moment in time but nothing lasts forever. In short, shit happens. But I believe that if you ask any of those girls at that time if they felt like they'd be friends forever, most of them would say yes. I felt that if I said I would be her bridesmaid while knowing that we wouldn't last as friends, I'd be doing a disservice to this girl and her wedding.
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| Photo via Siousca Photography |
I know you're probably wondering why I was even friends with someone if I didn't think we'd remain friends. It was a friendship of convenience, we were co-workers and didn't have many other friends in the company. She also wasn't a great friend to me, she was very bossy. It's not completely her fault, I allowed her to boss me around. We stopped speaking shortly after she left the company and she unfriended me twice on Facebook. There was no big blowout, no drama (well no major drama), we just drifted apart.
I'm glad I chose not to be a part of this girl's wedding day, not because of hard feelings I hold against this girl, because there are none, but because she won't have to look at a lost friendship when she looks through her wedding photos, which is something I knowingly prevented.
So what would you do? Would you be a part of someone's wedding if you didn't think you'd be friends in the end?