It can be the honour of a lifetime – or a gruelling, extortionate nightmare. With wedding season at its peak, Guardian readers share their horror stories
When one of her fellow bridesmaids got “sacked” from the role, then uninvited from the wedding, Kate had an idea that she was in for a testing few months. “I was a little bit alarmed by the intensity of the whole situation,” she says of the run-up to the wedding of her friend Stella. “I feel like weddings are something you should look forward to and that should evoke a sense of joy, but I was perturbed by the stress of it all. It didn’t seem to me that she got any enjoyment out of it.”
Kate was tasked with organising the hen weekend for about 25 friends. The bride made it clear that she did not expect to pay anything towards it. “I didn’t fully understand the real sense of entitlement she had when it came to how she thought she should be treated as a bride-to-be,” says Kate. During discussions about where they could stay that could accommodate everyone, within budget, Stella told Kate that she wasn’t doing her job as organiser well enough. “She said: ‘You’re not performing to the standard I would expect.’ In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous, but we were stuck in the throes of it at the time.”
