Knowing it’s ‘the one’....wedding dress that is!

SHOPPING For a wedding dress isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, they tell you it’s supposed to be a magical day – a day when you get to feel like a princess, and be treated like one too. A day when all you have to do is put on a few nice dresses and your nearest and dearest will weep over how beautiful you look. You’re supposed to feel excited and jubilant and radiant. I felt petrified.

You see, there are few things I hate more than being the centre of attention. The thought of people looking at me, expecting something from me, leaves me feeling sick and scared. Even thinking about having to walk up the aisle on my wedding day brings me out in a cold sweat. So trying on dresses and having everyone just sit there staring at me and examining me, and sales staff pulling and dragging out of me, wasn’t something I relished.

Before I stepped out of the changing room in the first dress, I had them all warned not to even think about sighing or sobbing. The last thing I wanted was a big show of emotion in front of strangers.

Luckily, my lot aren’t like that, and they remained serious and stoic. We all loosened up a little as the day went on, but I never felt completely at ease. Sure how could you when, really, the whole day is just one big sick joke.

You can say what you like about it, but anything that involves putting hundreds and hundreds of the world’s most beautiful dresses in front of you and then telling you to pick just one... Well that’s just cruel.

And once you pick that one, you can never, ever look at another dress again, for fear you’ll find one that’s even better. It was like being shown a giant box of chocolates full of all my favourite flavours, then being told I could have only one and, after that one, I could never eat chocolate again. Like I said, a sick joke.

And how are you supposed to go about picking only one? I mean, they say you’ll “just know”. Like how you know that the guy you’re marrying is “the one”. Most brides, according to my research, say that you’ll know because, when you put it on, you’ll cry. And your mother will cry.

For me, I had tried on countless dresses before the sales lady in the second shop I’d gone to told me that she’d got a feel for my style and for what suited me, and she thought she had the perfect dress for me upstairs. “By all means, bring it down”, I told her, before she warned me that it came with a hefty price tag. By the time she’d horrified me with the figure, my curiosity was already sufficiently piqued to want to try it on anyway. But I secretly hoped I’d hate it.

So she brought it down, I slipped into it, shimmied out to my groupies and stood in front of the mirror. It was beautiful. I cursed the sales girl and her cunning techniques, and the stupidly expensive price tag, and the slinky silk lining. But how did I know I didn’t just love it because it was so expensive, and not because it actually was “the one”? I guess it’s the same way I have to trust that my hubby-to-be is marrying me because he loves me, and not just for my stunning good looks. (Ahem.)

My poor, unsuspecting mother sang its praises, and told me it was perfect. Then I told her the cost. She stopped short, presumably fearing she’d be the one having to pay for whatever dress I ended up with, and immediately proclaimed, “I liked that other one better”.

And now that I’ve ordered it, I have to shield my eyes when I walk past any dress store. I have to avoid looking at websites with wedding dresses, and I have to ignore pictures of other brides, lest doubts start to creep in. But, in all fairness, I think I’m safe enough because, at the end of it all, I’ve chosen the dress that brought a tear to my mother’s eye.