This week, Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper went viral for airing an anti-bachelorette-party take that seemed designed to upset high-maintenance brides everywhere. “If you are the bitch that is asking your fucking friends to go to Greece for your bachelorette, knock it off—knock it the fuck off, okay?” Cooper said on her show. “Unless you are paying for every fucking thing, you got the plane, you got the tickets, you got the Airbnb…I don’t want to go to Greece and have to take [time off] of work…to go to your fucking bachelorette.”
I’ll be honest: I don’t really listen to Call Her Daddy (my three podcasts of choice are Gender Reveal, You Must Remember This, and occasionally How Long Gone, if my boyfriend has it on), so I was as surprised as anyone to find myself completely agreeing with every word of Cooper’s rant—even if she expressed herself a bit more, ahem, colorfully than I would have. It’s certainly not news that weddings can create a lot of work and expense for guests, but I’m actually not a wedding-season hater. I like open bars, I like picking out fancy little outfits, and, most of all, I like seeing my friends happy, so what’s to complain about?
Bachelorette parties are a whole different animal. I haven’t actually been to a ton of them, and that’s by design; when I get invited to a three-day weekend in Vegas or on a girls trip to Nashville, a frisson of fear automatically shoots through me and I tend to decline, no matter how much I love the friend hosting it. This is probably due to my recent two-year stint living in Austin, which has become a national capital of bachelorette parties: By the time I left, I couldn’t go for a swim in Barton Springs without having to duck a penis-shaped inflatable pool raft wielded by someone’s drunk, pink-cowboy-hat-sporting wedding bestie. (That whole culture is alienating to me, especially as a queer person.) But all the same, making your loved ones feel special before they make one of the biggest commitments of their lives shouldn’t have to mean committing your time and money (two things many of us never seem to have enough of) to a grand bachelorette party, in addition to the wedding.
It might sound selfish to skip out on friends’ pre-wedding festivities, but I would argue that it’s worse to go on a trip that you (1) can’t afford and (2) would rather skip. Unless you’re an Oscar-worthy actor, your resentment is probably going to become apparent to the bride-to-be—or to her other invitees—before too long, and you’ll end up putting a damper on an event that you could have avoided by practicing your boundary work and saying, “I unfortunately can’t make it, but how about I treat you to a special pre-wedding dinner where we can gossip and catch up before the big day?” (It is possible to be generous with your friends without shelling out for a four-digit ticket to Mykonos, after all.)
I am flying from LA to New York in June for the bachelorette party of one of my best friends, but some key details make me not want to break out in hives about the proposition. For one thing, it was entirely my idea, with the bride-to-be assuring me many times (and in a way I actually believed) that I didn’t have to come just for her sake. The bachelorette party itself is also an extremely chill upstate trip that will likely revolve more around nature walks and mild psychedelics than overpriced glitz and glamour, and I had enough advance warning about the blessed event to book myself an extremely cheap Spirit flight. Celebrating the nuptials of one of the most important people in my life while still saving enough money to potentially go on an actual vacation with my boyfriend later in the summer? That’s how it’s done, baby! But when it comes to more complex, spendy bachelorette-party invitations, just say no if you truly don’t want to go. I promise you’ll be glad you did.