This piece is part of the Dear Diary series.

I’ve always been bemused by the narrative of the starry eyed little girl planning her wedding in kindergarten. 

Over the years, I continued to remain skeptical about wedding planning. What’s the big deal?

Can’t you just hire someone to plan the darn thing for you?

So it was with some quiet skepticism that I drove my college roommate, Agatha, to her third wedding dress appointment at a sort of discount retailer of wedding dress samples. They collect the floor samples from high end boutiques across the city and sell them at discount, but what you see is what you get, and they only have one of each style, often only in one size.

This, I suspect, is a reality of the supply chain they rely on, but also a thinly veiled ploy to encourage impulse purchasing by emotionally susceptible brides-to-be. Love that dress? If you don’t buy it now, it’ll probably be gone by next week, and you’ll never find one like it again!

Upon arrival, the sales lady handed us five pink pieces of paper tickets with “Agatha” scrawled across in black marker. The mission: find five dresses for her to try on and stick the papers in the plastic dress protector. Sounds easy enough.

In reality, clawing my way through dozens and dozens of dresses is like wading in a cloud of sticky marshmallows. Everything looks kind of the same (read: endless permutations of white, lacy, poofy, silky, sparkly). The dresses are heavy and big—my god, the ones with cages look like they could just swallow a little bride in one gulp. And with a limited supply of tickets and only an hour allotted to us to use the change room, you get to a point of anxiety-induced paralysis.

Is dress A prettier than dress B and dress C? Maybe we should use the ticket on dress A… dammit, where the hell is dress A?  It’s been snatched away by another woman!

When we finally picked out five dresses, we were ushered into a grey, slightly worse for wear fitting room. Curtained changing stalls opened onto a wall of mirrors with little low pedestals for the brides to twirl upon. The lighting is terrible. So unflattering!  If your intent is to make people feel beautiful in the dress they are trying on, for goodness sake, get some warm lighting and skinny mirrors (you know the kind I’m talking about, the ones that make you look taller and slimmer than you actually are. As an aside, I am a big fan of skinny mirrors—it’s all about confidence anyway, so if you think you look better than you do, you’ll be more confident and thus better looking or at least more attractive anyway. It’s little surprise that I’ve packed and moved the same skinny mirror since college.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Dress One is pretty but photographs badly. The material looks wrinkled and a little grey.

Dress Two is gorgeous, but it’s the kind of dress that makes people say, “what a lovely dress!” instead of “you look lovely in that dress!”  Simpler would be better we decide.

Dress Three is very Great Gatsby, but the heavy silk hugs the curves of thigh and hip in a way that only a model would be comfortable with.

Dress Four is a confection of a dress. I call it the cupcake dress for all its frilly layers that, for better or worse, resemble cupcake liners.

I’m starting to think we aren’t going to find a dress today. Everything is decent but all my photos of Agatha in the dresses show her with head cocked to one side and a slightly questioning look in her eyes. I’m already starting to plan where we are going for frozen yogurt after this when she comes out in Dress Five.

Dress 5 is perfect. It really is. It’s long and silky with the subtle sheen of satin. Pretty cloth buttons run down the entire back of the dress to the hem like a line of pearls. Delicate floral patterned lace runs in a band just below the bust. Above, a plunging neckline adds just enough sexiness to an otherwise demure dress. She looks beautiful in it, and more importantly, the smile on her face means that she feels beautiful in it too.

Within ten minutes, we’ve paid for the dress and are jubilantly driving away with it. Maybe, there’s something to wedding planning and finding the perfect dress after all.

By River