Supportive Sally > Bitter Betty, Act Like a Lady

When you’re single and your best gal is single, you seem to spend all your free time getting happy hours and having sleepovers and watching shitty reality TV together. You can’t imagine a time when you won’t be attached at the hip, doing all of the fun things best friends do together. But, unfortunately, unless you have a sexual relationship with your best friend, you can’t possibly be everything to each other for the rest of your lives. Eventually, your bestie is going to find another bestie, but one who goes down on her, and things are going to shift. When your friend finds love, she’s gonna start ditching you. Even if she’s the best friend in the world, she’s still gonna start ditching you. And she most likely isn’t doing it on purpose. Maybe she just won’t feel like going out drinking until 2:00 a.m. to find dudes anymore. Or maybe she’s busy on Bachelor Monday because her boyfriend surprised her with a cute date night. It might feel like a big change in your dynamic, but please be happy for your person when they find their person.

When your bestie finds love, she’s going to retreat into her little love bubble. This is normal, but it’s also annoying to anyone who is not currently in a love bubble themselves. Remember that your love bubble is coming, too, and until then, you need to lower your expectations for your starry-eyed friend. She’s not going to be around as much. She might drop the ball. She might forget to text you back. But that doesn’t mean she’s a bad person or a bad friend. Even the best relationships take a substantial amount of energy, and she’s probably doing the best she can with the time she has. But there’s good news: She will come back around! If you don’t burn the bridge and guilt her for simply being in love, she will eventually find a healthy balance between you and her new dude. If you have the right friends and you find the right man, everything will work itself out in the end.

During the eight hundred years I’ve been navigating friendships, I think I’ve finally figured out the key to having (and being) a good friend. It’s a very simple yet very important question that I ask myself. The question is: Does she seem genuinely happy for me when I’m happy? It seems pretty simple, right? Think again.

In my twenties, I always assumed that the girlfriends who showed up for me during breakups, failed auditions, and lost jobs were the true ride-or-dies. It was so nice to have that one girlfriend who would drop anything to be with you in your time of need. We all know the type: She brings you ice cream, a bottle of wine, a pack of cigarettes, and all the energy in the world to trash-talk whoever or whatever hurt you…and it feels like true ecstasy.

That friend for me was Heather. Heather was like a superhero who swooped down at the first sign of trouble and didn’t leave your side until justice was served (or, in other words, until we had thoroughly destroyed some cheater’s life inside and out). There was a period of time when life just wasn’t going great for me in any department, and that’s when Heather and I really bonded. It was when Heather could showcase her superhero abilities and truly shine in the friendship department.

It wasn’t until 2015, when I started dating Zach, that I saw a different side of Heather. She would do weird things like fish for his flaws during our conversations about him. She would be quick to jump on anything he did wrong as a potential “red flag,” and she would constantly make comments about how it was a great “rebound” relationship for me. It was confusing to me that I would have only positive things to say about this man I was falling more and more in love with, yet this best friend of mine seemed to want to make me feel like there was something I was totally missing and that he couldn’t possibly be “my person.”

A year went by, and Heather finally calmed the fuck down (a little) because it was clear that Zach wasn’t going anywhere. During Zach’s and my courtship, Heather dated a string of guys who were truly terrible, and she was MISERABLE. I couldn’t blame her—she had hit a really rough patch, and I desperately wanted my friend to find herself a Zach. I felt a lot of guilt for having such a loving relationship while one of my best friends was lonely, so I gave her a lot of passes for her occasionally rotten behavior.

When did the shit finally hit the fan, you ask? When Zach proposed, naturally. This was the beginning of the end for Heather and me. I couldn’t believe how someone who said she loved me so much could become the worst, most negative part of this wonderful period of my life. She would constantly ask our mutual friends if they thought Zach and I were “moving too fast.” She made any and every event leading up to the wedding about her. I barely even saw her at my actual wedding because she spent the entire night in a corner, sulking. She officially turned into a sad, pathetic, emotional vampire.

I realized after that period of time that Heather never actually cared about me. She cared about having someone in a shittier position in life than her so that she could feel better about her own situation. She loved me when I was sad and weak, and she resented me when I became happy and strong. I never realized how important it was for me to have people in my life who not only showed up for the shitty moments but who would cheer me on during the great ones.

Now Heather has a baby and a fiancé she loves and (SHOCKER) is a complete joy to be around. Heather and I are still friends, but I definitely had to reevaluate our friendship after what happened. I put her in the “fair-weather friend” category, and that’s okay. She’s still really fun to get drunk with.

My friend married a total asshole, and we all knew it but couldn’t say anything to her.

She was cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs crazy about this dweeb from the moment they met. They started as friends, and her life quickly started to revolve around him. She changed her work schedule so that they worked the same shifts and offered to repaint his apartment, buy his groceries, and watch his dog. They were going to the same event “as friends” and having deep talks “as friends” and having meaningful sex “as friends who sleep together.”

Eventually, she followed him across the country (with separate apartments, of course, because they were “just friends”) and somehow wore him down to committing to her. I came to her rescue and scowled at him when their on-again-off-again thing would become off again. I begged her to have some self-respect and walk away from this selfish asshole, but there was nothing I could say. My job as her lifelong friend was to love her, be suspicious of him, and try to talk some sense into her. We’ve all been in this position, and honestly, I’ve been the cuckoo one before, too. She was smitten, and getting treated like absolute garbage only intensified her obsession with him.

To my surprise, they moved in together, introduced each other to their families, and got engaged. By that point, although I was wary, I just wanted to be there for my bestie and support her. I embraced him. I got his phone number, and I texted him here and there to try to deepen our friendship. We became Facebook friends. I would see them out together and ask about his life. We went together to the place where he was a chef, and I gushed over his mac and cheese. (Like, how hard is it to make mac and cheese, though?) When she asked me to be her maid of honor, I accepted. But as the wedding day neared, I began to be pulled aside by members of her family, our mutual friends, and even my own mom. “She’s not really gonna do this, is she?” they would say, or, “Ohhhh, I don’t know about him,” and, “She’s so different when she’s with him.” I felt the same way, but I felt like I couldn’t say anything to her because she was in so deep and because she really did love the guy.

The morning of her wedding was intense. No one really knew what to say. She was stressed, like most brides are, and was somehow convinced that a perfect bouquet and a beautiful updo could make her growing doubts go away. Off we went! The wedding itself was actually sweet. She looked gorgeous. They seemed really happy. He held her hand and was really loving to her. I remember riding with them in the limousine and looking at them and wondering if I had been wrong all along.

It came time for my speech, and I couldn’t say what I really wanted to tell him and the rest of the room: “If you hurt her I will murder you.” So I gave my speech focused 100 percent on how great she was and how lucky he was to have her. I spoke of her kindness, her loyalty, her sense of adventure, her beauty, her selflessness, and her sense of humor. I secretly hoped that he would hear it and a light bulb would go off in his heart and he would realize just how lucky he was. I was legit trying to convince this man that my friend was great—on their wedding day.

The first year of marriage went smoothly. She got pregnant, and then she got pregnant again. He stopped working, and out of nowhere, I saw my best friend working two jobs to support her family, with two kids under the age of four, while her dude hung out at home doing I. Do. Not. Know. What. The kids went to daycare. Her calls became more infrequent, and the distance between us expanded. I knew what was happening. Her life was imploding, and she didn’t want to admit it to anyone. I had been embarrassed and full of shame after broken relationships myself. I knew how it felt to have a righteous friend saying “I told you so.” She was also, to everyone’s horror, still really in love with this guy. She had lost herself completely. It was up to me, a friend who had known her since she was six years old, to remind her who she was.

I realized then that calling the man she loved “trash” wasn’t actually the best way to be a supportive friend. So I changed my strategy. I focused on her. How she was doing? How was she setting up her future? Was she taking care of herself? I sent her books. Encouraged her to go to therapy. Sat on the phone while she smoked cigarettes and drank red wine. The only thing I kept saying over and over again to her was “You deserve someone who really loves you. You DESERVE someone who REALLY loves YOU.” The cracks in their marriage appeared slowly. One day, it seemed like it could be saved, and another it seemed like a tornado of blame and lies and deception was pounding down on her. Some days she was strong, and on others she was a puddle of tears. I had a secret text chain going with my mom, her mom, and her sister-in-law where we constantly updated each other and made sure someone was there for her 24-7. It was ugly and hideous and childish and dramatic, but eventually she and her husband split up officially, for good.

Eventually, I got my best friend back. Her eyes started to sparkle. She started taking care of herself. She started saying things like “He is just saying these things to hurt me.” She focused on her kids. She met a new, wonderful guy. She lost weight and started working out. We laughed and gossiped and chatted about everything in our lives, and not just the latest thing going on in the divorce. I helped her get a really good lawyer. Of course, months later, her ex backtracked and tried to manipulate her into coming back to him. (My proudest friend moment is when she walked away and refused to get sucked back in!)

We get a lot of questions on LadyGang about whether or not we should say something to our friends if we see them with someone terrible. I believe you can handle it however you want, and the outcome will probably always be the same. People have to live through and survive their own messy shit. You can’t Bubble Wrap a friend when you know something is bad for them. All you can do is love them, hug them, and have a bottle of wine ready on the other side of their pain. It absolutely killed me to see my friend struggle to be loved in the way she did. But it was her heart that needed to heal, and my job was to just love her through it. That’s what friends are for. You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friends’ loser husbands, y’know?

Bridal Party Rules

If there is one thing we wish we could get the ladies of the world to understand, it’s this: Your wedding is the best day…of your life. No one else’s. Not even your sisters’. Stop expecting people to freak out and care about your wedding as much as you do. Don’t get us wrong, we are totally happy for you. We love you. You look gorgeous in that dress. But we didn’t notice that the flowers in your bouquet matched the flower print on the napkins in the bathroom. Honestly, the only thing we really care about is the open bar. We don’t feel comfortable going into credit card debt for a bachelorette trip to Cabo, a bridal shower in Nantucket, and a wedding on the Amalfi Coast. We’re all adults, and we’ve got important shit going on in our lives, too.

Let’s talk about bridesmaids. Bridesmaids are there to support you on your big day, but in no way, shape, or form are they required to drop their lives to help you plan your wedding for months on end. That’s why you hire a wedding planner. Unless you are paying them with cash dollars, it is on their terms when and how they want to pitch in and help you out. The truth is, if you’re going to have a wedding party and, God forbid, a maid of honor, their only job is to emotionally support you on your big day and wipe the lipstick off your teeth. They’re not there to run your errands.

If you have a destination wedding, and people are buying flights and hotel rooms and something nice to wear to your wedding, and you still have a registry, you’re a dick. Sorry to break it to you, but you don’t deserve a wedding registry if you’re asking people to spend thousands of dollars and take time off from work just to attend your goddamn wedding. We’re positive they would rather spend that time and money on an actual vacation of their choice. Also, if you have a destination wedding and someone can’t make it, you can’t get mad at them. You can’t write them out of your life because they didn’t have enough vacation days, access to childcare, and dollars to get to the South of France.

When I got married for the first time at twenty-one, I was under an immense amount of pressure to be the perfect bride. I was the first of my friends to get married because I was so young, and at that point, I had only been to one or two weddings in my life. One of them had been in a barn and the meal was a giant roasted pig. Not knowing what exactly I was supposed to do with this looming social event, I did what any ambitious pre-internet bride did in the early 2000s. I bought every wedding magazine at the supermarket, and I cut out all the ideas and pasted them into my own scrapbook for wedding planning (it was Pinterest before Pinterest existed). The only problem was that I was getting all of my wedding advice from wedding experts whose entire business was to stress you out about things that you would never actually worry about in real life. Was the ribbon on our invitations going to match the ribbon on the towels in the bathrooms of the reception? I had not given much thought to these types of details before my wedding magazine binge, but now that I was a bride-to-be, it was all I thought about.

My first husband was a New York native, and he was insistent that we have an NYC wedding. He had already planned out who his groomsmen would be before I had figured out how exactly I was going to get my broke-ass West Coast Canadian friends to New York City. Away I went into bridal party hell!

First, I asked my longtime best friend, Katie, to be my maid of honor. We had grown up together since we were six years old, and she is the person who 100 percent knows me the best on earth. From wearing matching Guess jeans to the mall in fifth grade, to holding each other’s hair back when we were drinking underage at sixteen, we had been through it all. She instantly said yes, and on my next trip home, we took the day off to go to the mall and try on potential bridesmaid dresses. We landed on a collection of stretchy spandex, royal-blue, halter-top, v-neck gowns with fabric that was sparkly because of tiny little glue dots that are covered in cheap plastic glitter. I didn’t even know who else would be in the bridal party yet, but we bought four dresses for (I think) $39.99 each and set off.

I had three slots to fill. I should have stopped there and explained to my future husband that I had left home twenty-four hours after graduating high school, had really only kept in touch with Katie and made some new friends during our cruise ship adventures, and that I couldn’t fill the other slots. But I stuck to what the wedding magazine had said, that it was “important to have an equal number of maids and men so that the photos were evenly proportioned.”

I dug deep. I asked my other closest friend from high school to come, and she said yes. She and Katie had had a tumultuous relationship throughout our teens, and there were definitely some weird vibes about who was my “best” friend. Nothing they couldn’t work out through sharing a hotel room at a Holiday Inn on Long Island the day before my wedding, right?

Next I asked my closest friend from dancing. We had spent many late nights in the studio, driving to competitions together, and rooting for each other. She had been with me when we flew across Canada to audition for the cruise ship job that I had taken where I met my first husband, so I felt like she was significant in our story. She said yes, and, of course, she loved the blue dress I had provided because, looking back, it was more costume than dress.

I was out of friends. I was definitely out of friends I could ask to fly to New York City. My best guy friend had said he would come to the wedding, but this was way before I was confident enough to screw with the rules of girls for the bridal party and boys for the groomsmen. The acceptance of men in a woman’s bridal party came a decade later. My first husband didn’t think to ask my best guy friend or my brother to stand up with him. (Selfish to the core.)

As the wedding approached, Katie mentioned that a friend we used to waitress with in high school was thinking about taking a trip to New York. She was an acquaintance at best. But she was coming to NYC, so I got her number from Katie and asked her to be a bridesmaid. Pathetic.

My mom threw me a small bridal shower where I opened gifts and wore a white turtleneck. It was beyond ironic, because I had fooled everyone into believing that I was going to need a twenty-four-piece china set from Crate and Barrel with gold-rimmed plates, serving bowls, and glasses—when I couldn’t even find four people to be in my bridal party. The next day, my dancer friend pulled out. She had booked her own cruise ship dance job and could no longer make it to NYC. A spot in the bridal party was once again empty.

I went deep into planning mode, and my first priority was showing my future mother-in-law the blue bridesmaid dresses so that she could help me match the balloons to the flowers to the table linens to the confetti to the favors to the menus to the invitations to the toilet paper—just like my beloved bridal magazines said. Her audible gasp when I pulled the stretchy glittery gowns out of a plastic bag made it clear. What was chic and special in my small town in Canada was tacky AF in New York. Laid out on her perfect marble kitchen island, in her perfect Martha Stewart house, in her perfect rich neighborhood, the dresses looked how I felt: like a complete piece of trash.

I couldn’t worry about the dresses though. I had bigger things to do on my list. My bridal party was still sparse. I ended up asking my future husband’s groomsman’s girlfriend to be in my tribe, to round out the heartwarming assortment made up of one person who really knew me, one person who knew me but could kind of be a bitch, one person I knew in passing, and one person who I had spent less than four days with in my life. It felt forced and uncomfortable, but I knew I had to keep up appearances and make it work. After all, this was going to be the greatest day of my life, right?

I ended up getting new dresses for the bridesmaids that were black satin, simple, and up to NYC standards. We all came together in Long Island: my bitchy friend made trouble with my sweet Katie, and I never spoke to the waitress friend or the groomsman’s girlfriend again after the wedding. Katie gave a beautiful speech, and we cried. In the end, a perfectly symmetrical bridal party photograph couldn’t save what was a disaster of an arrangement. Eleven months later, my first husband and I divorced.

Fast-forward to a decade later and my second attempt at a bridal party. This time there was no fancy hall and no invitations that matched the flowers. We sent emails to invite only our closest friends. We got married in the backyard. I didn’t worry about whether my people would come all the way to Los Angeles for a wedding, because we had spent the last decade being there in such major ways for one another. I was a (sort of) fully formed woman with beautiful and deep friendships. We had fifty-two people at our wedding, and I could have had seventeen bridesmaids from that group. Everyone in attendance was so very important to my life. Katie came to this wedding not as a maid of honor but as my lifelong best friend. She spent the night with me at my house and got ready with me in the morning. I didn’t have a bridal shower, or a bachelorette party, although my LA friends did surprise me with a roller-skating party that had cake but no strippers or penis cups.

The love I felt at our wedding was so deep and real and full. All my favorite people on Earth were there, and not a single stranger or fair-weather friend. There was no one from my work, or Chris’s work, and there were no cousins or aunts we had never met. It was the exact opposite of everything a wedding magazine would have told us to do, and I couldn’t have loved it more. Chris didn’t have any groomsmen, and I didn’t have any bridesmaids. Our beloved dog, Hobo, was our “dog of honor,” and she spent most of the night sniffing around, eating scraps off the tables, and getting belly rubs. She was the most perfect bridal party ever.

What I learned from my two parties is that human beings and their love for you are not accessories for photos or assistants to the bride-in-chief. It is not their J-O-B to spend all their money to celebrate you finding love. It’s not their job to succumb to whatever princess/movie star/prom queen fantasy you have going on during your wedding day. Your wedding day is a big day for YOU, and it’s just another day for them. You don’t need to call out your most special friends by making them wear an expensive dress they can never wear again and dance with your nephew. But chances are, if that is your dream, the friends who really love you will show up for you and do just that. Bridal parties should be renamed “still my friend when I hate my significant other” parties, “I love you too much to make you wear matching dresses” parties, or simply “I’ll still be around when you get divorced” parties.