Two weeks ago marked my second time trying on bridesmaid dresses in the past several years and both occasions had a similar theme.
Conversation centered around self-consciousness with how the dresses fit and surprise or disappointment with being a bigger size than we thought we were.
As most girls find out when they try on their first bridesmaid dress, the garment fits are based on measurements and there’s no vanity sizing like many clothing lines use to appeal to customers and encourage sales.
It’s a little disappointing when you think about it.
Here we were, a group of successful women, who should have been focused on celebrating one of our best friends getting married and the excitement of another step closer to the big day, but instead some of the anxious chatter was on whether we should buy the dress that day or wait to see if we could lose weight and go down a size first.
In my case, the future bride is my best friend who gave me the honor of being one of her two maids of honor, a scenario we’ve both been eagerly anticipating for years.
Although I tried not to make any self-deprecating comments on the day of trying on dresses, I did make a remark to my mother the night before that I was relieved I had recently dropped 25 pounds or else the day would have been hell for me.
I don’t want to speak for all women, but I will anyway — we’re all guilty of focusing on perceived flaws, whether we’re a size zero or size 12. Even at my thinnest and 20 pounds lighter, I still thought I could stand to lose more weight.
On this occasion, one of the girls was stressed about having to go up to a size 6. A couple of the other girls were a perfectly healthy size 8, but usually wear a 6. Hearing the self-conscious chatter among a group of girls who wear sizes others may strive to be may have been surprising to the casual observer.
Even that last sentence can be viewed as problematic, but marks another thing a lot of us are guilty of, which is unfairly comparing ourselves to others. The only thing that does is ensure we’ll never be happy with ourselves.
Maybe it’s due to the world we live in, or what society tells us is attractive. In the fashion industry, a size 8 is considered plus size, which is disproportionate to the approximate size 14 that studies show the average American woman is.
What could be seen as proof that we’re too hard on ourselves was on display after the bride, my other best friend and another bridesmaid in the wedding, and I went to get pho after the group dispersed after the dress shopping.
We were for some reason talking about things that we wanted to fix about ourselves, and the topic of skincare came up, leading me to make a comment about how I wanted to get laser resurfacing on my face to fix some marks left behind from acne before a course of Accutane cured it a few years ago.
My two closest friends were surprised, with one of them asking me to lean in closer so she could try to see what I was talking about, because she had never noticed it before. Then our other friend closed the conversation by saying something like, we spend entirely too much time picking ourselves apart.
It’s entirely too true.