It is! Thank you.
My daughter has been a bridesmaid so many times it’s a joke amongst her friends.
She’s pictured prominently in many wedding albums of her generation. She’s also hit up constantly to sing at weddings.
It’s kinda expensive in some weddings to be in the wedding party. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
The grass is not always greener.
I have never, in 76 years, ever been remotely close to being a bridesmaid/MoH, not even for the 3 friends who were my bridesmaids.
Not something I ever thought about (I’m male), but thinking about it now I don’t think a single marriage in my immediate family has ever even had bridesmaids that I’m aware of. Including my own parents who both married multiple times 
. We’re City Hall marriage/eloping sorts of folks, as are many of my friends, even the ones who did have a reception. I should ask, but I strongly suspect none of my more immediate female relatives and most of my female friends haven’t been bridesmaids either.
There are 7 in my sibling group. No room for outside bridesmaids. You used your sisters and sils or none.
Daddy’s rule.
Kind of my point. For various reasons, not just the age difference, there was no opportunity to be a 'maid for either of my sisters. And for various other reasons, cousins never asked. And for various other reasons…aw, phooey. You’re right; who cares! I did get to see Phantom Menace, ROTK and one of the Harry Potters at the Chinese Mann. How many can say that, eh? 
The first time I went to a wedding as a guest I was 40. Just saying.
My brother didn’t get married until he already had 2.5 daughters who took the role along with their slightly bigger cousins (yes, the 0.5’s scan pics were included in the photos including pics with part of the bridesmaid outfit in case of future ‘Well why wasn’t I a bridesmaid’ discussions).
I have one cousin who was close enough, but she announced the wedding at the same meeting where I announced I was off to Australia for a year, so I didn’t make it[1].
she divorced him and is now engaged to a woman, maybe I’ll catch the next one! ↩︎
Yeah, I read that and I was like oh goody, another culturally ingrained expectation about hoops that are supposed to be jumped through in a woman’s life or else it’s a humiliating failure and/or deprivation.
Bad enough that all women are traditionally expected to experience being a bride or else they’ve failed as a woman. Now there’s a bridesmaid box to tick as well? Do we encourage men to feel that it’s a routine and expected part of manhood for them to have a wedding-usher story to tell?
Feeling bad about having had bad experiences in childhood is totally natural but, as @LSLGuy observes, potentially pernicious if we continue dwelling on it in adulthood. Feeling bad about our experiences as girls and women in part because of comparing them to a conventional checklist of what girls’ and women’s experiences are “supposed” to be is an add-on side helping of systemic-sexism trauma on top of the individual perniciousness plate.
Maybe a bachelor party story…
My late wife had one sister. They were each each other’s MoH and that was the extent of both of their’s participation in other people’s weddings. Despite having been highly social women, in a college sorority, married at a mostly typical age for their era, etc.
I’ve been a best man exactly once and that’s my wedding participation except as guest (or groom).
So yes, dear @Rilchiam, that’s another unnecessary stick you’ve chosen to pick up from the roadside and then beat yourself repeatedly with. Mental self-flaggelation is a notoriously hard habit to break without help.
Right again! And seriously, no snark, I find your comments in this thread to be very supportive.
(Still can’t tell someone’s tone online. Emojis help, but often, I feel like I’m in that KITH sketch where the guy can’t change his sarcastic tone. “I really like you; I wanna be your friend…Hey, where you going?”)
Oh, I loved Sarcasm Guy. I haven’t thought about that character in years. Thank you for the big grins you just gave me.
Everything about KITH was inspired and that was a standout among many.
And yes I’m trying to be supportive. Thanks for picking up on the intended tone.
But as is well-known, there’s a difference between male-coded and female-coded “supportive”. As a stereotyped caricature, men tend to support by saying “To solve your problem you ought to do this other thing you’re not doing now”, while women tend to support by saying “Oh, no you poor thing! You have my total sympathy; the world is attacking you without justification and you’re doing the right / best thing you can to cope”
You can sure see how someone wanting to hear the latter and who’s instead given the former might treat that as the man attacking the victim. I’m trying to avoid us falling into that trap. I hope successfully.
Huh. My experience with both genders has usually been, “Try looking at it another way.” Unfortunately, and girls/women do seem to do this more, and a lot of times “You’re looking at it wrong” segues into “You’re wrong, full stop.”
Well, as I said before, this is coming up now because of my age and post-menopausal status. This is the age when people start assessing their lives. I can see now, I need to focus more on things I have done, or that have gone well, not the things I didn’t do or that went badly. For instance, I’ve been (mostly) happily married for 27 years, and we had a courthouse wedding!
And that alone (well, the 27 happy years of marriage bit, not specifically the wedding venue) puts you so far up the Succeeding At Life scale that you should feel immensely proud every freaking day! 
IME you are very successful at that. Remarkably so.
And seriously, now that I’ve had time to think about it, I can’t remember ever getting that “The world is attacking you, poor baby!” response from anyone. What I clearly remember, multiple times, is getting a Four Yorkshiremen response. “You had a box?! I had to sleep in an envelope!” Sometimes, I’m sure, it was well-meant, urging me to think of how much worse it could be. But often, it came off more like Depressed Persian Tow Truck Man. “Ugh, I wish I had your problems!” With a strong undertone of, “I’m a martyr and you’re a whiny brat.” So yeah, I wish I’d had the kind of girl friends who gave affirmations. Instead of playing Misery Poker.
ETA: But I daresay, if I’d had friends like LSL describes, I’d have been a bridesmaid, because that’s the kind of person who has Big White Weddings. 
From what I learned(I promise I don’t mean this with any nasty intent) from my Granny when I’d whine..she’d say “count your blessings”.
I never got to trick or treat. All my siblings and everyone I knew got to go. They’d have days of fun eating and trading candy. Halloween has never triggered me. I enjoyed it vicariously thru my sibs and children. Now grandkids.
A couple years ago the dialysis clinic decided to celebrate Halloween. Decor and loads of treats. Even the receptionist peeps wore costumes. Now that pissed me off. I couldn’t understand why. These things never bother me.
I finally decided it was a “me” problem. And I was transferring my anxiety on to the clinic..really they were just doing what every place was doing. Maybe the candy offerings were a bit much. Tho’ not everyone is diabetic in here.
I got over it. Then the Christmas/Valentine candies and chocolate plus decor didn’t faze me.
Sometimes you just gotta do what Granny said, and count your blessings.
I’d still love to sit in front of the TV and stuff 12 Reese’s cups down my throat. Just once.
I’ll shut up before this turns into a “oh yeah, listen to how bad I had it” thread
I feel like women, often starting as little girls, internalize some experience that in my mind are at worst unpleasant, inconvenient, maybe even slightly hurtful, but in the grand scheme of things, isn’t actually that big of a deal. But somehow it becomes this triggering event for the rest of their lives.
Kind of like how a cat stepping on a hot stove won’t step on a hot stove again. But it also will never step on a cold stove again either.
IOW it doesn’t matter if those thoughts are accurate or correct. They become reality. Forever.
LOL…yeah, because left to their own devices teenagers will spend their time hanging out in some dinky park, taking pot and shooting each other with paintball guns!
Although in all fairness, looking back to when I was in high school we kind of did the same thing except we were more like an underground paintball club that consisted of a loose coalition of I’m guessing 40-50 kids that met periodically to play in various backyards, abandoned lots, construction sites, even organized tournaments. Perhaps a topic for another thread.