Just wondering what others think of this situation-- (bride and groom are D’s friends. . .) A few days before the wedding, bride (organizer) emailed the best man (groom’s friend) and groomsmen (her brother, his brother) details about time place to show up, black shoes, etc. The email contained the phrase “clean shaven.”
The best man called the groom and asked where “bridezilla” gets off telling him to shave? He informed the groom that he had just grown a beard (a couple months since groom saw him) and did not want to shave it off. Groom tells bride about it. Bride emails best man and asks that if he won’t shave, as they preferred, to fit in with the other guys, etc. could he please make sure the beard is neatly trimmed. Best man calls groom and says something like, “The nerve of that crazy control freak–I’ll wear my beard as I please. . .do you think I’d come with a dirty scraggly beard?” Groom and best man got into a heated discussion about this and groom decided to “demote” the friend to groomsman, and have his brother serve as best man. When he tells his friend this, his friend tells him he is quitting the wedding party, and will not attend the wedding (this was about two days before the wedding). 15yo brother serves as best man. Bride’s b-i-l (clean-shaven, of course) filled in as groomsman.
IMO, the bride should not have been involved at all. If the guy is your “best friend,” why would you care if he has a beard? I do think the “preference” that “all men in our wedding party will be clean shaven so they all match and the pictures look just the way we want. . .” is, well, control-freakish. OTOH, if the groom is your “best friend” and really wants you to shave for the wedding (one-time special event), why not just do it–and grow the beard back afterward?
I think that too many brides have confused “My wedding” with “My coronation as Queen of the World.”
Your bridal party is supposed to be the people closest to you in the world, sharing an extra place of honor and helping you celebrate your marriage…
It’s not supposed to be about you remaking your closest friends, or the closest friends of your spouse. It’s about celebrating those relationships, not remaking them in the image and likeness of your vision of how “Your day” should look.
Its about the marriage, not the photos. The idea is to celebrate relationships, not destroy them.
Ahhh…the shaving question. Husband’s brother showed up at our wedding scruffy. Mr. Ellebud was peeved…and to this day will make reference to it. I was oblivious…but everyone has their thing. But at the end of the above bride’s day what she will remember that she “won”, but I suspect that this will be a pyrrhic victory.
If people remember who was clean shaven and who wasn’t, it wasn’t much of a wedding.
And the next time the bride and groom are casting for godparents for their kids I strongly suspect that there won’t be a lot of people to pick from.
omg. You’ve got to be kidding. With ALL the things to worry about, this bride has to worry about this? Unbelievable, really. It was out of line for her to get involved and out of line for either one of them to expect that from a ‘volunteer’ at their wedding. Jheesh. I agree with poster #2 100%.
Did she also tell her bridesmaids to pluck their eyebrows?
Honestly, I think this is over the top. You ask folks to be your best man because you care about them, and want them to be part of the special day. You don’t do it to control their lives.
I would want people to look NICE. I don’t necessarily think clean-shaven is a must, but I don’t think neatly trimmed is unreasonable. Unless the groomsmen are all siblings, they’re probably not all going to “match” anyway.
What a control freak! Where do either the bride or groom get the idea they can dictate someone’s personal appearance. How unfortunate this all blew up so close to the wedding.
I think she was a teeny bit over board, the usher freaked out more than necessary and the true person who over reacted was the groom to be. We should love and accept our friends as they are - those in the wedding party should want to look nice for the day. It sounds like an over reaction on all sides.
I would pull a Miss Manners here and completely ignore that instruction (if I were the bearded best man). “Oh, I didn’t see that part”, or “surely you don’t mean to inspect my grooming habits”, or “would you like to see my toenails too?”
Even better, show up freshly shaved but with hair that looks like it came out of a blender or out from an old episode of Grizzly Adams. “Oh, would you prefer that I have my lice treatment before the ceremony”?
The bride was out of line, completely. Her fiancé’s friends are not hers to make over. Besides what he wears on the day of the wedding (and there, they should consult about price) she has no right to ask him to change anything about his personal appearance. The friend was well within his rights to decline to shave, politely.
He should have quietly offered there and then to step down from the wedding party if the bride was going to be so unreasonable. As wrong as the bride was in all this, it was also wrong for the friend to react emotionally by calling her names. It sounds as if things just went downhill from there.
I disagree that it’s no big deal to shave and grow back the beard. It is none of the bride’s business anymore than it is to dictate hairstyles of her bridesmaids.
Sorry, I’m with the bride on this one. It might be a bit control freakish, but people on here certainly don’t seem to mind telling others to cover up their tattoos or piercings as they’d be “unsightly” or, my personal least-favorite, “tacky”
I’ve seen some super ugly beards in my lifetime and, sorry, wouldn’t want them in my wedding pics. Asking for it to be neatly trimmed was a good compromise and the now ex-friend went off the deep end. JMO.
Fwiw, I would not be above asking some of those in my wedding party to shave or have trimmed beards. I’m close to all of them and some of them are beyond oblivious to things and need to have directions explicitly laid out for them. None of them would react this way though- there are way more important things in life than a beard.
My husband had long hair and a beard when we met and got engaged. He cut the hair and shaved s couple of months before the wedding. Not at my request–he didn’t even tell me and in fact startled me with his new look.
The wedding was the first time many of our guests had seen him clean shaven. Some peopke seemed to think I had asked him to do it. I was frankly a bit insulted that people thought I would make such a request.
My BIL showed up to my wedding with the most awful buzzcut. He had a great head of hair normally, and it was out of character for him to look so bad. I didn’t say anything to him (thank goodness) but he let me know that “the rest of my swim team is completely bald. I compromised, and left as much hair as I could for your wedding.” We took pictures with BIL and family and never gave it another thought.
I vote control freak. And how insulting is it that she thinks this, presumably, grown man can’t be trusted to know to appear at a wedding well-groomed.
In college, a friend asked me to be her Maid of Honor. I accepted. She then asked me not to cut my hair before the wedding. The wedding was a year away. She wanted all the attendants to have “matching” hair.