There’s a famous scene in the Sex and the City movie where Candace Bergen tells Sarah Jessica Parker, “40 is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding dress without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”
Well, I’m about to put that to the test.
The comedic message in the line (and I’m not here to police anyone’s joke, so relax) is that if you’re over 40, being a bride is more than just a rarity—it’s downright odd. The notion of an older bride is so perplexing to the bridal community that it has no idea what to do with us. Not since Logan’s Run has there been a community more vehemently dead set against the participation of persons over a certain age. And let’s be real—weddings are a young gal’s game. It’s their world, and I’m just the 43-year-old squirrel trying to get a modestly priced wedding gown with good upper arm coverage in it.
Even if you Google “over 40 bride,” the offerings are downright depressing. The bridal industry offers us shapeless potato-sack dresses or cream-colored suits that look like what you’d wear to an interview at a bank, or a prison. Our kind is relegated to the ranks of “offbeat” brides or “non-traditional weddings.” Because being over 40 and wanting a blissful ceremony to celebrate a lifelong bond with your true love is wildly bucking tradition, I guess. And don’t offer me the list of fabulous over-40 celebrities who’ve gone down the aisle; those are millionaires who look like supermodels and can probably afford to summon ancient necromancers to morph them into perfect brides.
The worst way to prepare yourself to be an older bride is to peruse any contemporary magazine devoted to brides and their bloodlust for flawlessly embroidered lace gowns. Every bridal magazine model looks like a wide-eyed blonde ingénue in a Tim Burton film, lost in her own path to self-discovery while she waits for some weirdo in a top hat to come save her.
These photos come in either one of two modes: Freakishly overjoyed or devoid of all expression. The first type is never pictured with her mouth closed and is often seen either running through a burst of fairy poop (or confetti? Can’t really tell them apart) or pictured wildly laughing at something distinctly unfunny, like a slice of dry wedding cake, while presumably caught in mid conversation with bridesmaids who are equally enraptured at literally nothing. “Oh my gosh, Frances, this cake I’m not actually going to eat has filled my heart with the whimsical joy of a thousand French clowns riding unicycles backwards over a bridge made of ham!” It’s just like that.
I’m as thrilled as the next person to be getting married, but I’m not “Scream-Laughing With My Head Thrown Back and Twirling Like a Rabid Pixie” thrilled. Maybe if I was 20 years younger, perhaps I’d be more excited at the prospect of standing around all day in a dress talking to relatives I haven’t seen in 10 years. Besides, I’ve been to a ton of weddings and no one has ever been that freaking happy. What do you have to laugh about anyway, Debbie—Aunt Marge drinking the last bottle of good wine and your cousins fighting with the bartender?
If bridal models aren’t frantically euphoric, they’re lethargic and anemic, channeling the mood of an 14-year-old Sepultura fan who has to endure a road trip her family singing The Best of John Denver the whole way. Every other picture is a dead-eyed bride who refuses to smile or acknowledge human emotion in any way, her dress hanging on her in a state of shambles like she just fought off Maleficent’s dragon. I’m not sure exactly whom this would appeal to, other than a bride in a BBC melodrama who’s forced to marry an aging duke to save the family’s fortune. If my wedding theme is “Intimate Beachy Nihilism,” then I’m set.
Nothing in any of these magazines speaks to me as a middle-aged woman. Sure, maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe I should just start my own bridal magazine. Methuselah Bride: For the Bride Who’s Just Happy She’s Not Dead Yet. Or how about a realistic magazine, like Acerbic But Politely Tolerant Bride or I’m Not Wearing Spanx On My Wedding Day Bride.
For the digitally savvy who have no time for culling through the printed page, there’s “Bridal Pinterest.” For those who are unfamiliar with what Bridal Pinterest is, it’s where they send you when you’ve committed heinous war crimes in a previous life. It is the dark netherworld of social media. In fact, if Dante were alive today, he would have made the Ninth Circle of Hell involve sitting at a computer scrolling through 60,000 pins of ivory veils that are nice but not quite what you’re looking for. If you’ve ever wondered how many pictures of poorly bedazzled headbands it would take to drive a person clinically insane, Bridal Pinterest is where you want to go.
After conducting extensive research on the topic, I can with great authority tell you that there are exactly 89,761,264 versions of the mermaid dress. I looked at so many mermaid dresses pretty soon all I saw were mermaid wedding dresses. Everything was a mermaid wedding dress—the dog, the toaster, and that cop who told me to stop touching his shoulders and whispering “this could really use another embroidered rose up here.”
Sure, these are all beautiful dresses and accessories, but the truth is, I would look and feel weird in all of it. Diane Arbus would be clamoring to shoot me in a mermaid dress because I look about as normal as a dog with a chicken growing out of its head. (Don’t get up in arms, if you’re 75 and you want to rock the mermaid dress, you don’t need me to tell you will rock that look.)
I want something that tells the world, “I’m 43 Freaking Years Old and I Can’t Believe Someone Is Even Willing To Do This With Me.” I want a dress that says, “I Thought I’d Be On My Fourth Ex-Husband and Seventh Bankruptcy By Now, Who Knew?” My dress should say, “If You Touch My Chicken Parm While I’m Up Here Saying These Vows, I Will Stab You With My Salad Fork.”
No matter what I wear or how I do it, this day will be perfect, in my own, over-40 kind of way—with or without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.
Rebecca Rose would rather be doing anything other than looking at Bridal Pinterest. She can be reached through Interim Managing Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 2, 2017.