Warning, this is very long, pretty rambling, and a bit whiny. I'm trying to avoid overwhelming my friends and family with my wedding-related complaints so there's a good chance a lot will be dumped on these forums.
I have no idea what I want in a wedding dress. The last time I bought a dress anywhere other than Target was ~40 pounds ago, so I don't really know what looks good on my body anymore. I've also never been good at picking out clothes from pictures, so even after doing all the research online and in magazines I still wasn't able to narrow down my preferences much.
Well, I figured that sure it makes sense that I don't know how to pick a wedding dress, I've never done it before. I could probably use some help from a professional, someone who does this all day every day, so I set my first appointment to look at dresses.
The lady helping me was nice, but I really apparently should have had a better idea of what I wanted. "I really don't know what I want. Fit, neckline, fabric, all of it, I just don't know. I'd like to try on a bunch of different stuff and narrow it down." "Sure honey, we'll find something you love! Hmm, do you like lace?" "Um maybe?" Cue the montage of me being shoved into what felt like the exact same lace overlay/trumpet cut/sweetheart neckline dress over and over again for the next half hour.
It was awful and I felt like she wasn't listening to me at all.
"This one has a keyhole back." "Oh, well I don't think I want that. I have a lot of blemishes on my back," *next dress* "This is an illusion back. It isn't really backless because it has this mesh that covers you." "I can still see the issue spots though, I don't think this fixes the problem." "Oh it does sweetie don't worry." Do you...not have dresses with backs? I'm pretty sure those exist.
"Could we try some with straps?" *Exclusively full-sleeved dresses appear* Alright I guess straps means something different in crazy wedding land, do you have a pocket translation dictionary or...?
At one point I noticed that every single dress she was bringing me was from the same designer, which probably explains why I could barely tell the difference between them. I don't know if this was an accident or not. I want to hope it was, but I can't help but wonder if they were being pressured to sell more of that specific collection or something.
The worst bit? I started checking price tags and realized that all of these dresses were several hundred dollars above the top of the budget range I had selected on their little information sheet. It wasn't like I had written in some crazy low price that they didn't have options for, this was a check box on a form they had made! Why bother to ask about a budget if you're just going to ignore it and do whatever you want anyways?
Apparently when looking at one dress I must have given some kind of signal, because the next thing I knew I had a veil on my head and all the store workers were doing little claps. My dressing room was cleared, the lady logged the dress number in their system, and it was stressed to me over and over again that I needed to make my final decision before their 10% off sale ended this weekend. Which, hey, that's not a bad sale, but when I've only looked at dresses far outside my price range it's not going to make up the difference.
In summary, I will be getting married in whatever dress I can find at Target the day before the wedding. They're the only one I can trust anymore.
But really, what can I do to make this easier at the next place I go? I'm sure having a better idea of what I want would help (also having a backbone and telling her to stop it with the over-budget nonsense, but that's a whole 'nother issue to tackle), how exact of an idea for your dress did you have when you went shopping?
Bonus question: anyone else have a dress shopping sob story? I'd love to know I'm not the only person who didn't have a super magical rainbow fun time.