“How Tacky”: Woman Refuses To Attend Cousin’s Bridal Shower After Seeing $300 Entrance Fee

Weddings are expensive affairs, particularly if you decide to have all the bells and whistles, from bridal showers, bachelor parties and a honeymoon getaway. After all, this is supposed to be this once in a lifetime moment, so most folks want to go all out. Of course, returning to reality, that often means figuring out how exactly to pay for everything.

A woman wondered if it was “normal” for a bride-to-be to charge $300 just to attend her bridal shower. We reached out to the woman via private message and will update the article when she gets back to us.

For those who are perhaps unfamiliar, a bridal shower is much like a baby shower, where the subject gets “showered” in gifts from their friends and family. This is an important point in this particular story, as now the attendants not only have to bring gifts, they also have to pay just to show up. Given that most people will also bring a wedding gift, it’s easy to see how some costs can really get out of hand.

This idea seems to have originated in the 16th century, as an evolution of dowry traditions. Poorer families would often not have the resources to send off the young woman with what she needed, so hosting such a “party” would be a way to prepare her. There is some evidence that this began in the 1860s, in Belgium and the Netherlands, before spreading to the US.

However, in the English speaking world, bridal showers were generally something only middle class people did, with it “trickling down” to poorer folks after a few decades. In the US, the first written instance of “bridal shower” comes from the Michigan Evening Press, which wrote, in 1904, “The ‘shower parties’ that through mistaken hospitality the wedded couple are forced to attend,” indicating that perhaps it wasn’t always the bride-to-be organizing her own events.

After all, helping a friend or family member finance their wedding can be understandable in some circumstances, but a bridal shower is a sort of a nice “extra.” Indeed, in much of the world, it’s an entirely foreign concept, as gifts are reserved for the wedding itself. In many cases, people might even feel like it’s just an anachronistic holdover from the past. This isn't to say that there is anything wrong with it, but if you are hosting a bridal shower, which is ostensibly a celebration of you, it’s important to know your audience.

Indeed, in some places, it’s relatively normal to host very large bridal showers. In Canada, some weddings will involve showers with 300 seat venues, just to host everyone the bride wants to invite. A fantastic way to get a lot of gifts, but perhaps not as good for spending quality time with your bridal party.

In this particular story, it’s also quite annoying that this woman is being asked to fork over three figures for a drinking event, when she herself does not drink. It’s not entirely unacceptable to have a more lavish party, if you and your friends can afford it. However, any reasonable person would also conclude that perhaps not everyone wants to attend an event like this. A non-drinker would probably not want to hang around drunken folks for free, much less for $300.

The woman in the story is well within her rights to refuse to go, particularly if she has already put the time and effort into getting a gift in the first place. Similarly, she has already spent a good deal of money on the Bachelorette party, so this seems like a minor issue. However, as so often happens with certain kinds of brides, everything that could be a point of conflict will be. The bridal party are supposed to be the friends of the woman who is about to get married, but they don’t exist just to fork over cash.

It does seem like she is better off not spending more of her time and money on a person who, according to her own comments, seems to really want to live beyond her means. Everyone is free to make their own financial decisions, no matter how misguided, but trying to outsource the costs to your “friends” is both tacky and downright bad.