Botoxing the Bridesmaids

Botoxing the Bridesmaids May 24, 2017

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It’s getting to be wedding season and now, more than ever, is a great time to consider the most important moment of your life. Last week we took a little gander at Self Marriage. Today I thought it might be nice to look at something a little more traditional–the groom is a man, check, the bride is a woman, check, the bridesmaids are all on hideous diet exercise and regimes, wait, what!

“I need everyone on board,” says Barton, a 30-year-old p.r. executive who lives in downtown Brooklyn. “I want my guests to invest in their appearances, feel pretty, go buy the dress of their dreams and feel confident in themselves. I want everyone to feel and look beautiful.”

To achieve this glorious utopia, Barton the Bride ‘suggested,’ cough, that the bridesmaids all get fit, get hair extensions, and disallowed them from wearing bathing suits with straps before the wedding. More also,

Malik and Barton have both scheduled a Botox treatment with Rowe a week before Barton’s July wedding. Barton is also encouraging another bridesmaid to have her earlobe cosmetically fixed to wear the chandelier earrings she’s picked out for the entire wedding party.
“I can’t have her in studs,” says Barton.

I should say not. What a travesty that would be. How would western civilization even go on.

But don’t worry, Barton the Bride is not the only one worried about the tubbiness of her bridal party.

Bridesmaid Ashley Lagas, 29, says having a wellness weekend was a mutual decision between herself and bride-to-be Rachel Lenhoff — one that definitely left them feeling sore for days after.
“We based our weekend around the boot camp, but we also ended up doing yoga by the water the next day,” Lagas says, adding that the bachelorette weekend also included organic smoothies and a healthy brunch. “We just wanted to be really active the whole weekend.”

Mmhhhmmm. I’m sure that’s what they all wanted. I mean, that’s why I myself got married, and why I even go to weddings. If I can’t carefully examine the body mass index of each person in a dress, what is even the point. I mean, sure, there’s usually two people ‘in love’ or something approximating that state, there’s free food, sometimes there’s even wine, there might be dancing, there’s sitting around with friends and enjoying the thought and care that so many people put so many months into making a beautiful party, gosh, sometimes there’s even, during the service, a chance to pray for the couple, to bless them and witness the weighty moment of them pledging themselves together before God. But seriously, none of that, None of it is as important as scrutinizing the bridesmaids to see if they’re too fat.

Remember back to the ancient bad old days when brides wanted to outshine their bridesmaids, in terms of beauty, as it were. You wouldn’t get bridesmaids who were Prettier than you. You didn’t want everyone looking over at the third girl on the left and then at the groom and wondering to yourself, ‘Why isn’t he marrying her?’

All kidding aside, there are a lot of ways to pervert marriage. You can have too many people in the marriage (like more than one man and one woman). You can have the two people to be way too similar (as in gay mirage). You can be horribly abusive or controlling….I mean to your spouse, but why limit it there? Why not control Everyone. If I were the poor groom in this scenario, I would take note of the way the bride is treating all the people in her life and then gradually and unobtrusively back away. Truly, it would be better for these brides to cut with the farce and just embrace Self Marriage, since that’s essentially what they’re trying to do.

The marvelous thing about True Marriage, of course, is that it isn’t about You. It’s about The Other Person. It’s one of those extraordinary moments in human life when you can lose consciousness of yourself by being caught up in the other person. You don’t Need marriage to do this, of course. You can always turn your whole self out towards another person and consider his or her good above your own. But marriage makes it a little easier, and having children takes it the rest of the way. The fact of the matter is that the self, unhappily, is a trap, a burden, a trial. The more you are in yourself and focused on yourself and considering yourself, the more imprisoned you are. It is therefore a serious drag to take the single easiest way to get over yourself and ruin it by ever more fully embracing yourself under the guise of caring about the other person. How long, I wonder, until we get Self Divorce. What a charmer that will be.


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