I don’t get acting like a bridezilla…it doesn’t make sense. Yes it’s YOUR special day, but that doesn’t (IMO) give you license to make everybody else’s day hell because you want what you want.
Mamaw always said you draw more flies with honey than with vinegar. Plus, if I had acted like that, she would’ve had my mom and my aunt whale the crap out of me for not behaving because I was not raised to act like a spoiled, selfish little brat.
I blame the Modern Wedding Culture as practiced by twenty-something women.
When family and friends planned the wedding, it was about compromise and family tradition. These people kept each other in check; if the bride got out of line, Mom and/or Grandma were there to put her in her place.
Today, of course, the MWC is about the fantasy of a perfect wedding. And it’s no longer just the wedding day itself; there is a process that begins with the most wonderful, unique way to propose (with the perfect ring, which has become the sine qua non of engagement) to the “Save the Date!” cards that must go out no earlier than six months before the actual wedding because you don’t want people to make plans for Your Special Day, to the multiple bridal showers (which MUST have a theme and tacky wedding-related games), to the rehearsal dinner (which is planned about as well as the wedding itself), to the Big Day. Along the way, the bride and wedding party are persuaded to believe that all of these things are necessary, because they know that if they don’t do one of these things, they will be judged harshly by their peers, many of whom are going through the process themselves.
So when one of these things doesn’t work out the way the bride feels it must, she has a temper tantrum. I’ve bailed on weddings when the bride has acted this way. As it is, I’ve stopped buying gifts from bridal registries. I’m not going to enable this shitty behavior.
Remember, too, that for the show at least, we’re dealing with a self-selecting group of women who want to be on television. They know as well as you and I what the show is, and that they’re going to end up on the cutting room floor if they behave themselves.
Just like no one goes on Jerry Springer to have a nuanced debate with carefully researched citations, no one goes on Bridezilla to calmly choose between ivory and taupe chair covers.
And then young, impressionable, emotional women with more money than sense watch this and internalize that this is how they’re supposed to act.
Planning a wedding is stressful. A wedding is a very public event, and it’s something a lot of women have never done before. In some cases, the woman has never done anything even remotely like this before (this was the case for me).
People sometimes act badly when they are stressed. You’ve never lashed out at anyone because you were stressed?
Of course, not all bridezillaism is due to stress, but I’m sure some of it is.
The Bridezillas TV show provides an incentive for women to act this way. Some people just want to get on TV. The attention they’re getting for doing this is negative, but for some of these people, that’s better than no attention. It’s the same basic reason why some kids behave badly- because they want attention from their parents, and they can at least get negative attention this way. You give a person or animal something it wants for behaving a certain way, you’re going to see that behavior.
I have to say, I’ve been surprised at the amount of zilla-ing I’ve seen even at places like Offbeat Bride’s forums. Every time I see something like “Okay, so it’s eight hours away for her, but this is my bridal shower of which I will have EXACTLY ONE IN MY LIFE” or “OMG, can you believe the colors of the dress my mother picked out? I TOLD HER MAGENTA” I do get the impression that these women are very young.
ETA - those are actual rants, by the way.
The wiki article states that ingesting negligable calories for as little as 5 days can cause all kinds of problems but I wouldn’t classify 800 calories/day is negligable calories.
Considering that most women need about 1600-1800 calories per day to maintain their weight, 800 calories per day is certainly “negligible”.
I’m assuming negligible doesn’t have a special meaning in this case (which could be incorrect) but if so then half is not negligible.
neg·li·gi·ble
[neg-li-juh-buhl]
adjective
so small, trifling, or unimportant that it may safely be neglected or disregarded: The extra expenses were negligible.
But as WhyNot mentioned upthread, it’s a low enough amount that patients coming off of tube feeding have to be monitored for problems.
So tomato, tomahto.
Essentially it just sounds like a crash diet - stupid, yes, but not really a new kind of stupid.
Oh I figured you’d started trying to have a baby, and when yer paw found out he gottis gun. Eventually.
Oh I get that..when Stickman and I got married, I was still in school with a part time job and living at home and he had a full time job as a teaching assistant as well as a part time job in a retail store. We were planning a wedding on a shoestring, since we wanted to pay for it ourselves and I remember how stressful it was. But I knew that if I lashed out, even stressed out as I was, I was going to get a whop upside the head from either my mother, my aunt (who was heavily involved in the planning) or Mamaw because they didn’t raise me that way.
I think the stress of the wedding prepared me, though, for what would come later. Stickman and I both worked in retail for many, many years (he still does, actually) which is a VERY stressful situation, esp during the Christmas season. I think that maybe having to go through THAT kind of stress for so many years prepared me (sort of) for the stress of dealing with Stickman’s political career and a special needs child.
It’s all about point of view. If a bridezilla thinks that a WEDDING is stressful, wait till real life starts throwing stressbombs in her way.
Except that different people react differently to different kinds of stress. What’s a 10 on a stress scale of 1 to 10 for person X might only be a 3 for Y, and something that is a 7 for Y might only be a 2 for X. Your temperament, life experiences, and what you are and aren’t good at doing factor into it. You can’t make a ranking of stressful events that applies to everyone.
I found planning my wedding to be stressful, and not fun at all after the first couple of weeks. I still sometimes have nightmares where I have to go through another wedding, and I’m relieved to wake up from them. I understand that this experience is not typical. I’ve heard that some people are even sad that they will never get to have another wedding. For me, that’s like saying you’re sad that you will never again have to take a final exam that you haven’t studied for. I also have the final exam nightmares, and when I wake up from those and when I wake up from the wedding ones, I feel about the same.