The Wedding Party: Picking Who Will Stand Up with You

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They say hindsight is 20/20 and I couldn’t agree more. When it came to picking our wedding party this was no exception. I can only hope that at least one person learns from me.

Since high school I had already assigned the role of bridesmaid to two of my closest friends and maid of honour to my sister, and because I’ve been planning my wedding before I had even met my mister, this was mentioned to them and others multiple times.

When I moved away from my hometown, to the ‘big city’ to go to university I met K after a year living here and we have been best friends for ten years now, so it went without saying that she would be my fourth bridesmaid.

Now that I had already decided on four, I actually started to stress out when my brother dated a girl that I got close to or when I start hanging out with another female on a regular basis, that I didn’t have ROOM for another bridesmaid! It never occurred to me that I should have waited to ask people to stand up for me until AFTER I got engaged. Nor did I think that I had the option of NOT asking any of the previously ‘assigned’ women.

So when the day came that my mister finally asked me to marry him, I quickly phoned my four bridesmaids and asked them to be my bridesmaids, leaving very little room for them to say no.

To be fair, my two high school friends no longer live in the same city as me and have their own commitments in life. Because of that, it came to pass that one of them chose to step down from this position. So now I’m down to 3 bridesmaids and my mister has 4 groomsmen.

We have decided NOT to replace my bridesmaid and will go with the uneven party, mainly because if I were to ask another girl to step in it would be just to make it symmetrical and I don’t think that is a good enough reason to ask someone.

I realize now that we should have waited to ask everyone. Our wedding was over a year away, we had time. If we had I might have realized that asking someone just because they were your best friend through high school or because you stood up for their wedding, didn’t mean that you HAD to ask them to be in yours. Nor did that mean they WANTED to be in yours.

We should have taken the time to figure out what we expected from our wedding party and then asked people accordingly.