Congratulations to us all. We’re halfway through wedding season in India. We’ve braved nuptials we were invited to and reluctantly attended, as well as those we watched unfold on Instagram, secretly wishing we had been invited to them but hadn’t. Like I care about your Château de Versailles–inspired extravaganza, Avantika. We concocted pithy portmanteaus and humorous hashtags for couples that make us dewy-eyed and the ones that reek of relationship rot. And burned holes the size of moon craters into our bank accounts for them all.
But, let’s admit it, the most interesting wedding every season is the one that wasn’t.
You know the ones: the blended WhatsApp wedding group suddenly goes eerily silent. Soon enough, private chats are ablaze with gleeful/glum I-knew-its, followed by aunties channelling their inner Lady Whistledown to ferret out a scandal and uncles anguishing over non-refundable deposits. It’s dramatic, it’s disastrous, but also a teeny-tiny bit delicious, depending on your relative position within the emotional blast radius.
Now imagine being the unwilling heroine perched at the centre of the expensive operatic mess that is a cancelled wedding. Or its polite cousin, the indefinitely impending nuptials. And imagine enduring a wedding season in India that has a you-shaped hole in the calendar. “It’s awful, humiliating and painful, doesn’t matter who called it quits or what really went down,” is the consensus among four recent almost-brides: Arti G, Oindrilla, Gigi* and Prerna**.
These four women survived the carnage to give us a definitive ‘how to’ guide: how to prep for the chaos, how to commiserate without being cloying, how to be a girl’s girl even while dishing the dirt.
Arti G: When you’re the runaway bride
1. Plan for pain
It’s going to hurt to see people get married on or around your wedding day, even if you’re the one who ended things. Preparing for pain somewhat inures you against it.
2. Don’t make other people’s weddings about yourself
If you’re attending weddings around the time you were meant to be married, it’s quite likely that you’ll be the topic of conversation or even subjected to outright intrusiveness. If you can’t handle the side-eyes or gossip, don’t attend. If you do attend, don’t make a spectacle of yourself. Whatever you do, don’t be a drunken slob.
3. Avoid weddings where you might run into your ex or his friends/family
There’s no moral or egotistical victory to be won by attending. I’d even recommend the high road and, if possible, let them know you won’t be there so they’re not walking on eggshells.
4. Don’t gloat/overshare
Not everyone needs to know you did the leaving and why. If your ex feels the need to save face by making you the jilted instead of the jiltee, allow them this small grace.
5. Set boundaries with the friends who know the details
There might be occasions when your friends will feel like they need to defend your honour out of loyalty. Tell them exactly what and how much is okay to share, so they’re spared the mental gymnastics. If you’re the friend who has to establish that your bestie isn’t, in fact, an irredeemable villain, stick to the approved script no matter how much you’re itching to set the record straight.
6. It’s okay to feel guilty…
…but it’s not okay to be guillotined for acting in your best interests. A polite-but-firm “moving on” to change topics is perfectly acceptable when Detective Do-Gooder decides to make your business their business.
Prerna**: When you are caught cheating and get dumped
1. Leave the city, country, whatever
Travel. Sit this wedding season out, regardless of whose wedding you’re missing. If your wedding’s been called off because you cheated, there’s no way the sordid details haven’t made the rounds.
2. Know that there will be a lot of gossip…
…and that none of it will be kind to you, a lot of it will reach you. When that happens, keep your crashouts (there will be many) private.
3. Don’t lie
When the invariable “But what the hell happened?” question rolls around, don’t lie, don’t try to justify, don’t try to play the victim. Even if you think you had reasons for cheating, keep them to yourself. “I made a mistake” is a perfectly adequate comment.
4. Don’t parade your cheating partner in public
Even if you’re in a relationship with them now, the wedding season is not the time to go official. Seeming too gleeful will make you come off as petty and crass. Do the decent thing and pretend to feel bad.
Gigi*: When the families quit on each other
1. Don’t bitch about his family or yours
Bitterness is aggressively unappealing at weddings, even for a bride-that-wasn’t.
2. Resist the urge to wear your unused bridal outfits at someone else’s wedding
It might be economical, but it’s also pathetic and cartoonish.
3. If you have a family feud brewing, don’t stoke the embers at someone else’s wedding
If you can’t be civil in public, don’t attend weddings together. Be very careful about what you say. Families have a way of magically resolving issues overnight (or, better still, pretending they never existed at all). They might forgive each other, but they won’t forgive you.
Oindrilla: When your wedding is postponed
1. Don’t seek therapy at someone else’s wedding If your wedding is in limbo while you work through messy life situations or personal issues, don’t use someone else’s wedding as a group therapy session.
2. Don’t make up fake dates
It’s just going to make you sound pitiful and prolong the cycle of misery. “We’ll let you know when we have a date” is sufficient engagement with self-appointed town criers.
3. Whispering about the will-they-won’t-they wedding
Don’t run around declaring the time of death on the couple. You don’t want to be the friend who had no faith if the wedding actually gets resuscitated.
