TLC's Say Yes to the Dress

It seems as though there are 3 distinct types of brides that appear on this show:

1. The Low Self Esteem Bride
2. The I Am Fabulous Bride
3. The Princess Bride

The Low Self Esteem Bride
This one is the most difficult to watch.  This bride thinks she looks terrible in everything and arrives at Kleinfeld having already tried on 100 dresses.  She may be a size 2 or a size 30, it doesn't matter.  Every dress she tries on looks fine to us, the viewer at home, but the bride hates it and thinks she looks huge or her bo-hiney looks flat or her surgery scar is showing etc.  The Low Self Esteem bride usually goes way over the time limit for her appointment and then ends up leaving without buying anything.  The Low Self Esteem Bride is often named Debbie...Debbie Downer! Zing!

The I Am Fabulous Bride
This bride is loud and boisterous and obnoxious.  She usually has an entourage of at least 10 people (who are also loud and obnoxious) and include relatives, friends, co-workers, sorority sisters, wedding planners, gardeners, mail carriers and tax accountants.  Ok, maybe not those last few.  This bride is the opposite of the low self esteem bride in that she thinks EVERYTHING looks good on her.  I am in no way a fashion expert but even I know that if you are an apple shaped person you should not be buying a mermaid style dress.  Another recurring theme for the fabulous bride is that she picks an over the top dress with a lot of "bling" (that is a word from the show, not a word I choose to use in my normal vocabulary).  Only after she has fallen in love with the dress does she bother to look at the price tag and realize it is double her budget.  Ms. Fabulous usually decides to go ahead and buy the dress even though she can't even almost afford it but will of course look fab-u-lous on her wedding day.

The Princess Bride
When a bride meets with a consultant at the beginning of her appointment, one of the first questions is, "what is your price point?"  The Princess Bride almost always looks at her father or mother or grandmother (whoever is planning to pay for the dress) with a pouty lip and big Bambi eyes until the one with the wallet answers the question with my favorite Say Yes to the Dress line of all time: "whatever my baby wants my baby gets".  In other words, there is no price limit as long as the little princess is happy.  The Princess Bride often says she wants to look and feel like a princess on her wedding day.  Why is this term used so much in America?  We don't have princesses other than Disney princesses and I personally do not want to model my wedding dress after Jasmine's belly dancer pant suit from Aladdin but that's just me.  I get that your wedding day is important to you but some of these people get way out of control.  Is it really worth it to spend 10 or 20 or 30 THOUSAND dollars on a dress that you are going to wear for half of a day?  The fathers always say (with a little apprehension in their voice) that they just want their little princess to be happy.  Well it's your fault there Dad that she isn't happy with anything less than the most expensive dress in the store.  Maybe if you had set a few boundaries earlier in life she wouldn't be such a spoiled brat.  Maybe the Dad is just happy to marry her off so that she is on someone else's payroll.