I've seen this in
friends and
friends of friends and I dearly hope to
never ever see it in myself. Basically, it is a state of
temporary insanity induced by an upcoming
wedding. Usually it is the
women involved, such as the
bride and the
mothers. (I'm only familiar with the
symptomology of the bride.) The
syndrome can last up to the entire
engagement-actual wedding period. It can result in
family feuds, losing
lifelong friends,
bankruptcy,
nervous breakdown, and permanent
personality disorder (if she doesn't
snap out of it). Common symptoms include:
- Extreme
irrationality.
Victim may be heard to utter such statements as, "I know the wedding is in
Alaska in
January, and I know you can't afford a
plane ticket, but can't you just, you know,
drive from
Florida to come?" Objections to these statements may provoke
rage,
paranoid accusations, and even
physical violence.
- Loss of contact with
reality. Victim may experience
amathia, treating amounts of
money over
$10,000 as though they are
pocket change. Victim will expect others to behave similarly; poor
grad students with equally poor friends will register at
Gump's and
Neiman-Marcus and damn well expect their
so-called friends to
PONY UP.
- Sudden
personality change. A
geek girl may suddenly become obsessed with fluffy
pink lace, a diehard
tomboy may spend hours picking out the perfect pair of satin
high heels. Victim may also begin to
hallucinate, believing that all those huge
bows on the
bridesmaids' dresses are really just wonderfully
cute.
Treatment: Patience, and not giving in on everything. There's a
fine line between making your friend
happy on her
special day, and letting her
drop out of school for a year in order to pay for the
veil. Unfortunately,
preventative measures such as discussing an
alternative wedding often don't work, even when the
bride appears to be enthusiastic about the ideas--once the real wedding looms, many revert to
Princess Di images of what a wedding should be like. So just hang in there, and don't let her be paying off this wedding long after her
grad school debt is gone.
N. B.: Has nothing to do with
cute weddings.
And yes, there's
male AWIS, too, but that's usually either simple fear-of-growing-up
terror on the part of the
groom, or
panic on the part of the
fathers (who are usually justified in
squawking about watching their
grandchildren's
inheritance go down the drain).