Bridezilla

Disclaimer: while there are several brides-to-be in my life right now, I hope they all know themselves well enough to realize this story isn't about them. That said, in French we have a saying: qui se sent morveux, qu'il se mouche!

Still from the movie Bridesmaids

Honestly, doctor, if I had known this was a real thing, I would have watched out for it way sooner.

But come on – you only ever hear it mentioned as a joke, you know? Nobody tells you it’s an actual possibility, I mean I see the leaflets now that I’m in your office now but do you know how hard it was to even find you? Specialist in chronic transformational diseases, that’s not something you hear about often.

Warning signs? Well not before I did it, no. Or at least – I don’t think so? I mean, she had bookmarked a worrying number of inspiration pics on Instagram and I guess there was that giveaway contest where she created, like, five new accounts to win? But I just sort of assumed she was getting caught up in the excitement, you know, two of her friends were just going through it then and I’d asked her mom for opinions on how to do it, so I think she just needed an outlet for all of that anticipation? To tell you the truth though, at this point, I don’t really know anymore.

The first real sign for me was when I got up after she’d said yes. It was super faint and I didn’t know if I had imagined it but, ugh, with hindsight…

It was a really beautiful proposal, classy and everything. Her parents were there, and her sisters and her best friend, and my parents and siblings too, and we were on a boat on lake Como – not Italy mind you, the one in Pennsylvania, which yeah, I get that’s less exciting but honestly can you imagine the hassle of shipping all of those people halfway across the world? It was already difficult enough to get them to drive a few hours into another state – I would never have been able to find the perfect mariachi band either, so it really was the best option possible if you ask me.

What? Oh, yes, sorry – the symptoms. So anyways after the mariachi played I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston and her family and mine had all given little speeches about how much they loved us and whatever, I get down on one knee and I propose, traditional and all that, super classy, so of course she does that cute thing women do where they put their hands over their nose to show they’re surprised and also about to cry, you get the kind of gesture I mean? Yeah so she did that and then she said ‘oh my god, Jason, I do, oh my god’, that part was pretty standard, and so I put the ring on her finger and of course it fit perfectly because I’d stolen one of hers to mold it against, you just can’t spare any effort in those moments you know what I mean.

Anyways then I got up, because to tell you the truth there was a bit of water at the bottom of that boat and it was starting to sog up in my pants and I didn’t want to look odd or anything, one weirdly wet knee or whatever.

So then we had that moment, you know, where we hugged and then we held onto each other’s shoulders and we looked into each other’s eyes, and let me tell you the photos are great – no really, I’ll bring them over next time I come so you can see, getting the families on small boats around us meant we definitely couldn’t go wrong with angles, and so as I’m staring into her eyes I’m noticing that they’re a little red but like, not the whites of them, the blue looked weirdly colored but I just kind of assumed it was something with the candlelight – did I mention I had candlelight lanterns surround us on the lake by the way, yeah it was really a beautiful scene, so I thought okay, she’s been crying, because duh, and there was fire everywhere and that was what I was seeing, but then obviously we all know what happened so that must have been when it first started showing.

But the thing is, one of my friends was telling me about this, you know this story about the frog that you put in cold water and then it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realize you’re starting to heat up the water and then it lets itself get boiled? Same, doc, that’s exactly what happened to me, I mean I’m alive but it was touch and go there for a second and we planned the wedding so far in advance – two and a half years, man, that’s basically as long as we’d been together pre proposal, you know, anyways I’m sure that was part of it, that it just took so long to build up.

Like yes, I guess that weird flick she was doing with her tongue when we visited venues should have been a red flag but it looked so cute, you know? I just thought she was getting excited, and her whole push for a raw bar at the reception was so smart as well – I mean obviously those all got a bit scarier once she started, you know, shooting fucking lasers from her mouth any time she got upset, but her pupils didn’t even slant until a whole year in, so really who could have guessed? And I know that this is like, literally what you do, doc, but no offense – did you really expect me to believe future brides can actually turn into a hybrid human/lizard type and that’s what they call Bridezilla? I thought Bridezilla was, at best, a few traumatized bridesmaids after some overly stressed out bride-to-be flips her shit at them or something.

Anyways that wasn’t your question sorry – the symptoms.

So we’re six months in, right, and we’ve sent the STDs out – what? Sorry, no, save the dates – and I let her pick the envelopes and the font and whatever, because honestly why not if it made her happy, and we started getting the first responses in and I open my sister’s reply and she points out that we’ve picked her birthday as the date, and I know what you’re going to ask, how could I not have noticed and my answer to you would be, I’m here because my fiancee’s turned into a homicidal lizard, I’m clearly not the king of details, am I? But then when I showed her my sister’s reply and I asked if she knew she just smiled a little demonically and kept on scrolling through her bridal tablescaping lookbook, and at that point I did something no man should ever do: I said ‘OK, well should we change the date?’ and even now thinking about it I go back and forth, I mean on the one hand I appreciate she’d sent all of those invites out but we hadn’t even found a venue yet, we could have moved it one weekend later and it would have been totally fine but I guess I underestimated how much she would care and the weird part, right, was that she freaked out. She started throwing all these items around the house – I mean that’s not the weird part she does that any time she’s angry, but what ticked me off was the things she was throwing, because normally she’ll go straight for our plates, I hide our serving set on purpose so she’ll only break the cheap IKEA ones we can rebuy easily, but this time she was throwing, like, our record player and this super heavy vase like it was no problem even though it should have been a problem, it really should have, I mean she’s so anaemic to begin with that she always asks for my help when she’s carrying one of them, I mean that vase had a lead-enforced bottom, and sure she’d started personal training sessions for the wedding but that felt fast, right, for her to get that ripped in just a few months, so I waited until she’d calmed down (we didn’t end up changing the date) and I asked if she’d started taking any supplements, you know, steroids or whatever, and she wasn’t upset actually, she told me she’d been having a lot of insect meat and raw fish lately and it was really helping – which obviously hearing that now it was another warning sign but I’d definitely heard about insect diets before so I figured it was legit.

And besides – this was nothing compared to the actual transformation, because things escalated in the last few months, I mean really, really escalated. I’d say the hissing started probably around a year in, once we locked down the venue and she started on the catering and stuff, which to be fair I kind of get because it can’t have been relaxing organizing a party for 700 people, I mean I really offered to cut the list down or take stuff off her plate, I promise I did, but she kept saying this was going to be her big day and she wanted everybody to be there and for everything to be perfect, and I kind of get that I guess, like it’s the one time ever that she was gonna have all of the people who loved her gathered in one place (all 630 of them, I have to say, my list was way shorter than hers), so I couldn’t really blame her for making a big deal out of it but of course not everything’s going to go perfectly, so any time someone said no to her she’d just start with that weird ssss sound and it kind of worked, actually, a few people got scared and ended up giving her what she wanted, like the tablecloth guy who was trying to get her to agree to a bunch of smaller table cloths stuck together for the main table, I’ve never seen a guy look so scared I mean the man was full-on stuttering, and actually now that I think about it do you think those people knew? They’re in the wedding business so I figure they might have seen what she was going through and thought ah, fuck, best not to wake the beast.

I mean, props to them, because at that point I was walking on eggshells – alien mutant or not, like she’d asked to know about every detail of our bachelor party and I had thought aw, cute, she’s jealous of the strippers but then I spoke to her best friend and it turned out it was because she wanted to make sure her bachelorette party was more fun and at that point, you know, it’s not just about the lizard voices.

I think the problem is she’d started insisting on us sleeping in different bedrooms like six months before we got married, you know to make it romantic or whatever, and I didn’t really think to argue against it at the time, especially because she’d started having this weird chesty snore that kept waking me up, but then one day she was lying down in the sun – this was T-2 months I think, and her skin had gotten a bit yellowy and I’d already asked her if we should go see a doctor but she kept talking about her new diet, and anyways she looked so happy napping that I laid down next to her and went to big spoon her, but then when I touched her arm it was covered in scales. And dude, I’ve never been so glad that I was one of those guys who froze in the face of danger because fuck me, I would NOT have wanted to confront her in that moment, but just thinking back on it, it felt so cool, so weirdly slick… eugghhh.

So that’s when I started doing my research I guess. I noticed that she’d started doing this thing where she'd open her mouth whenever she was angry, and there was this faint ray of light that was coming out of it, so I started by googling ‘real Godzilla powers human woman’ and say what you will, doc, but it actually yielded results – I found the Bridezilla symptom straight away.

Why did I not come see you then? Well that’s the thing, doctor: most of the websites I found kept saying that she’d probably have a big blowout just before the wedding, but that all symptoms would go away once we said our vows so I kinda thought, you know, grit your teeth through another month or two of this craziness, read through all of the even more insane AITA crazy bride stories and remember how much you love her because this isn’t her fully, which made the prospect of the honeymoon even more exciting, I guess, that I would finally get to be with her and not this crazy lizard again.

What I’m trying to say, doc, is I hadn’t for one second imagined that it would get so bad we wouldn’t be able to say ‘I do’. It genuinely didn’t cross my mind, which again, hindsight is everything, but when your future wife’s gotten so worked up about it that’s she’s literally gone reptilian, it’s hard to imagine she’ll let out a nuclear ray that’ll burn down the entire estate and kill the priest, if you know what I mean.

So that’s where I’m at now. I know you’ve got her in a safe place and I’m so thankful for you doctor, I really am, but I haven’t seen her in a few weeks now and the dust is starting to settle, so my question is: can we get her back? Or has my girlfriend become Bridezilla? And one last thing, are you really sure you can't explain why my arms keep getting furrier?