AT THE COUPLE’S BECK AND CALL
Ms Nina Hashim, who has been a bridesmaid five times, still vividly recalls the first time she was tasked with wedding preparation work, which left her physically exhausted.
The 24-year-old, who works in sales and marketing, said that the bride was understandably stressed because the wedding was being planned at the last minute in 2022, at a time when Singapore was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, so she relied heavily on Ms Nina for support.
On the wedding day, Ms Nina was primarily responsible for collecting props, dresses and wedding favours, often arranging private transport or hiring a moving company for larger items.
“I didn’t have time to eat at all. I had to run around (during the wedding) with my heels on,” she said.
“I ensured the cake arrived on time, that the driver was there and the dulang hantaran were on time, making sure everything was perfect.”
Dulang hantaran are decorative trays used in Malay weddings to present gifts between the bride and groom’s families as part of the engagement or solemnisation ceremony.
As exhausted as she was by the end of that busy day, she felt relief as well, because it signalled the end of a three-month ordeal that involved non-stop wedding planning.
“Sometimes, she would expect me to be on the phone 24 hours a day,” Ms Nina said, adding that she often received calls from her friend at 3am to talk about the wedding plans.
“The first two times (it happened), I closed an eye, but afterwards, I told her it’s a bit unreasonable because I’m also studying.”
Thankfully, her friend called her at more reasonable times after that.
“I was definitely stressed out and tired from the back-to-back travelling and juggling school work,” Ms Nina added, believing that her friend’s behaviour was due to wedding-related stress.
Another woman who gave her name as just SM had to prepare the sangeet for an ex-schoolmate’s wedding because she had a dance background.
In her late 20s and working in the technology industry, she described her secondary school friend as someone who was not particularly close to her.
She initially agreed to be a bridesmaid because she thought the commitment needed would be reasonable.
Given that the wedding was just two months away, she assumed that the choreography would have been prepared and that she would be responsible for just teaching the bridesmaids the dance and joining in the performance on the wedding day.
To her shock, there was nothing planned and she was expected to “do it from scratch”.
That meant that she had to secure a venue so that they could rehearse, pick the right music and manage the training schedules of seven bridesmaids all by herself.
It was a logistical nightmare, she said. Communicating and coordinating with bridesmaids from different social circles was difficult and it was made even more challenging because they had to rehearse during the year-end festive season.
One by one, several bridesmaids dropped out of the performance and what was originally a choreography for seven ultimately became a smaller dance performed by just a handful who were available.
