The New York Times Weddings section, forever on the beat of things that are hot and sexy, draws our attention to a new trend for brides: taking weekend trips for their bachelorette parties with their besties and/or having more than one bachelorette party. In general, neither of these ideas seems entirely new. What they are is very expensive.
In an article that appropriately references The Toast‘s great parody bachelorette party email chain piece, the Times goes into the hush-hush world of debaucherous bachelorette parties that last for days, leaving the attendees pockets drained. At least one such party, held for a bride named Tracy, was so expensive that it cost each attendee $4,000 for four nights of partying Miami – “And that was after Tracy’s fiancé paid for one night for everyone at the W hotel, which lowered the price.” (Though in this instance, all the women attending paid for Tracy’s costs as some sort of group birthday dinner gone awry. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall of the passive-aggressive email chain when that idea was first broached.)
But wait! Maybe this Tracy (no last name because apparently she was one of several women interviewed who didn’t want their full names revealed “so as not to completely lift the curtain on a clandestine girls’ weekend”) is the only one out there having these crazy parties! It was in fact also Tracy, Tracy of the $4,000 bachelorette party, that held a separate, “more low-key bachelorette party with her West Coast friends at a California beach,” without alcohol, because most of her West Coast friends are pregnant. Unfortunately, she’s not alone in her party planning: another bride interviewed flew to Paris for five days, which cost her guests $20,000 to $25,000 – not including shopping.
The Times credits this “trend” to the number of people getting married later, which means the individuals in question have accrued more resources to pay for such shindigs. At the same time, the paper says having many different bachelorette parties means that people who don’t have enough money to spend all their living wages on other people’s lives can partake in the fun (another possibility explored through an interview in which someone “spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending the bride”). But which is it?! Are we more loaded and crazy than ever or are just a few of us that way and the rest are along for the ride?
(That was a rhetorical question. It’s the latter.)
Personally, I know a few groups of women who have done overnight getaways for bachelorette parties that were, as far as I’m aware, just low-key weekends of drinking, eating and movies. Then again, most of the people I know are far too fucked up and without resources to even consider getting married, despite how great they’d be at these endless parties that are the clear point of getting married in the first place.
A Bachelorette’s Night (or Four) to Remember [NYT]
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