If your budget doesn’t allow for covering some of your bridesmaids’ costs, you can find other ways to get the point across to them that they are important to you. Money is only one vehicle for showing them love. Your time, your words, and your consideration in the details are all free ways to demonstrate to these women that you are honoring them.
My friends, for example, had a bridal army! A massive group of their friends walked down the aisle and clustered up front by the bride and groom. The bride and groom found it more important to honor those people in their lives whom God led them to honor than to have a traditionally numbered bridal party.
Address their concerns. If you decline their suggestion, see if you can address their real need behind it. For example, if your parents were worried about your sister feeling left out, you can tell them how you intend to honor your sister in a different way.
I think the best case scenario is that your guy best friend would befriend your fiancé and vice-versa such that your dynamic in both relationships can appropriately change, allowing your fiancé to be the main man in your life. If this is the case, then your fiancé might want your best friend on his side.
Ah, PC. Sigh. As sad as it is that we have to think about being politically correct with our own bridal parties, we do to an extent. We are dealing with people we dearly love and so we want to be sensitive to their feelings.
Whether you lean more towards the lasting aspect of friendships or towards the influential, you will make a great decision when it is prayerful. Again, there is no rigid standard for which friend makes the perfect bridesmaid. However you consider the significance of your friendships, choose bridesmaids who are meaningful to you and to your soon-to-be marriage.
Why are you having the wedding you are having? Why are you having a bridal party? Do equity, family reconciliation, cultural standards, transformational relationships, symmetry, simplicity, political correctness, fear of offending, reciprocation, budget restraints, and/or intimacy play a role in your choice of bridesmaids?
Even though I knew nothing logistically about being a bridesmaid, I began to discover that it meant something spiritually to be one. The fact that my friend chose me unconditionally to stand at her side that day and the fact that God used her wedding to change my life proved to me that something spiritual happens in the bridal party of a Christian wedding.
