Reader, I Found My Dress— I Just Can’t Afford It Right Now.

My potential wedding look

I started shopping for wedding dresses a few months ago. The strangest thing happened: I expected to feel giddy and excited—maybe the way I did when I was eight, shopping for my birthday dress—but I didn’t.The culprit? Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

In her chapter on wedding dresses, aptly titled “The Oh Mommy Moment,” Mead describes the moment when it feels as though the dress is choosing the bride as much as she is choosing the dress—eliciting an almost childlike “oh, mommy” (Mead, 77). She goes on to discuss the bridal wedding industry, eventually traveling all the way to a Chinese wedding dress factory (Mead, 94). It feels like an unfortunate adage, but if clothing is manufactured in China, we know the production cost is likely far lower than the final retail price. Mead does not give readers a specific figure for how much it costs to produce a wedding dress, but she does note that workers at the Top Fashion factory earned about $150 per month.

I’m not here to tell any bride that her dress was made with exploitative labor. What I am saying is that the price I was facing at Vow’d was almost certainly marked up by a percentage I don’t even want to calculate. And the irony didn’t escape me: a dress I would wear once cost more than the ring I’ll wear for the rest of my life. Money was never part of my fantasy. I know that sounds childish, but as I navigate this financially precarious season, I’m realizing how little I considered money when I was fantasizing about my wedding day.

As I stood in a crepe A-line dress with a bridal scarf draped around my neck, I didn’t have the “oh mommy” moment. Instead, it occurred to me that I am no longer in the fantasy of a wedding; I am in its reality. And being in reality means confronting the shadow side of the fantasy. The fantasy was that I would go wedding dress shopping with my friends and find the dress that would make either me or my mother tear up. That I would “propose” to my girlfriends with extravagant gift boxes, asking them to be my bridesmaids. That I would have bachelorette parties and bridal showers, with outfits planned for each event and just the right amount of stress accompanying every choice.

I didn’t realize how many assumptions were baked into those fantasies: that I would live my whole life in South Africa, where old and new friends and family live close to one another; that I would be settled into a career of my choosing and steadily saving for my big day. That is not my life right now. I live in the States, while my family and childhood friends are in South Africa. I am navigating a career shift. I have enough money to support myself, but figuring out this transition means accepting a degree of financial insecurity. Financial insecurity is certainly not part of the wedding fantasy, even though it is an ongoing reality of adulthood.

The certificates have been signed. I feel married. But I still want a wedding. I want a celebration. I want a room full of people I love, all together in one place. I have always wanted to wear a wedding dress. The fantasy is gone, but the desire isn’t. I wish I could tie this up with a silver lining. But what I want to name—because it isn’t talked about enough—is how quickly wedding culture turns love into a purchase, and how shame rushes in when you can’t afford the version you were taught to want.