This story begins 13 years ago after a particularly rough year of trying to make ends meet as a graduate student. My girlfriends and I were in our mid to late-20s and mostly apathetic about traditional expectations for women. In the eyes of some, we may have been putting off a lot of things in our life to pursue a doctoral degree. We had just enough time to earn $11,500 year to teach public speaking at the university while attending classes, fueled by hopes of one day becoming professors.

I picked up the camera and recorded our lives when our road to social mobility was fraught with unanticipated barriers. It wasn’t unusual when our life choices tended to collide with traditional female expectations but nothing caused more friction and joy like the bridesmaid ritual. Most of our peers had gone on to start families and begin professional careers. The costs of becoming a bridesmaid in just one wedding, let alone three in one year, required multiple jobs and a serious love for the ladies in our lives. There was always great sacrifice involved, financially but also emotionally.  

Becoming a bridesmaid is ripe with tension, beyond the usual personality clashes that come with completing the tasks of a wedding. Being a bridesmaid is at once a reflection and a meditation. It is a witnessing of the love before you and a meditation on the state of companionship in your own life. As much as the ritual is filled with joy it also has the potential to evoke great sorrow. How this tension maps on to the relationships of women across their lifespan is complex and sacred. At the same time, these moments are mostly overpowered by joy and laughter. Becoming a bridesmaid is one of the only few moments in our lives where sisterhood is written into our communal rituals, a time when the relationship between women are honored. 

One of the major social transformations in our time is the speed in which women are postponing marriage until their 30s, especially as they gain access to social mobility. This means most of us are living in at least two decades of a wedding haze, where we are asked to be in weddings, attend them routinely, plan them, set them up, and some choose to throw their own wedding. One thing is salient, throughout our lives—and some decades in particular—we routinely asked to engage with the consumer habits the wedding industry cultivates without much room to question.   

There seems to be another dimension to understanding bridesmaids’ culture from the perspective of educated, socially mobile, working class women. Representations of these women who are reprioritizing traditional female priorities as a choice are mostly nonexistent in popular culture. Our life as assistant professors did not contain much space for the domestic expectations that women often confront. We were entering the kind of profession where it is of great advantage to be partnered with someone who takes care of all practical matters in life so one can completely focus on work. The kind of field where motherhood is often understood as getting in the way of a proper research agenda. It was hard to know which way to step and there were few roadmaps. How one engages traditional female rituals, like becoming a bridesmaid, was tricky on this terrain. This was especially tricky in our late 30s, where slipping into the wedding patterns and formulas packaged for women a decade younger just felt uncomfortable, strapless dresses and all.

These are not tragic problems. These are just the kinds of far reaching tensions we don’t talk about. Cultural codes that are weaved into the very fabric of our socialization. They are the kinds of problems that profoundly effect the way women in the United States think of themselves and what they expect from each other. I strive to make films that document untold stories, alternative history, bottom-up thinking, and critical of our most basic social conventions. We are doing this film on bridesmaid culture this so that we can all consider and (re)consider how the unexamined ritual conditions us all.