Wedding Dress Helldom

Remind me never to do this again. What a horrible business to deal with. Everybody's a queen, especially the shopkeepers. There have been two crying bouts about the hopelessness and depressingness of it and poor Manfriend is left trying to console me.

I swear if I look at another anorexic child in one of these dresses I'm supposed to imagine myself in, I'm going to wear sweatpants. I get the whole "image" you're trying to sell of the sexy, moody bride but do ALL your dresses need to be modeled this way? And what's with the sickly concave-shoulder look?

I tried to book an appointment to look at this one shop's dresses. They owner called me back about an hour later. We got the whole Temple question out of the way and then she asked, "Why are you looking so early?" Confused, I asked, "Early?" I mean, the wedding is 8 months away and these things can take 6 months to get your hands on and then there's alterations and throwing even more money at a dress you will only wear once. So apparently most LDS girls shop 3 or 4 months out. Lady, that is not normal. Everyone else I talk to has been stressing me that I need to get this taken care of. Immediately. As in, I can't wait until March when my sister is finally available to look with me.

And then she asks what size I am. Crap, are we talking normal-people size or dress size. "I'm a 14 in regular clothes," I tell her thinking she will tell me that I'm probably a 16 or 18 in wedding dresses. If only I were so lucky:

"Ooooooo, you're going to have a hard time finding anything in that size. Most people don't carry anything above an eight." "Oh, OK, sure sure," I said. At the time it seemed reasonable but later it was a ball fest in itself. Seriously? A size EIGHT??

"And what's your price range?" I tell her I am hoping for something under $500, though really anything over $300 will be hard to swallow. It's just a white dress!!! "Oh, well then you might want to check out my other store because I don't have anything in this store under $1,500." Oh dear, you've got to be kidding me.

Oh, and can I get some sleeves, please? Or some straps? I'm certainly not keen on the chance of me falling out of it when leaning down to hug someone. Or when breaking out the square dance.

It's just so hard to tell the scale and hoity-toity'ness of these stores from their Websites!

So far my only safe haven has been David's Bridal. The mega store that realizes that plus-sizers might want to see dresses worn by other plussers. Go figure. And they actually have dresses under $200! But I want something unique and different and who doesn't want to support the little guy?

Too bad those little guys are making it really hard. So I'm taking the afternoon off in an effort to not shop with 800 princess brides and am venturing to David's Bridal. It will be my own, private hell since I have no one to go with me. Do you think they would just die if I brought my groom in? Because I'm thinking about it. Haha, or would he look for that hole in the ground first?