the feeling was something like "i feel like i don't belong at a fancy bridal appointment like this...even though i totally do, because i am indeed a bride-to-be." i think my feeling was correct, but my reasoning was faulty.
previously, i have indeed felt a certain imposter syndrome when my fiancé and i first started dating. after nearly three decades of being officially single (i had dated around of course, but had never been in an official relationship), i now had a boyfriend. and i was a girlfriend. it felt jarring to reorient my identity as someone who now belonged to this club of being partnered, that i had absolutely never experienced before.
so i thought this time it was something similar! i assumed it to be an extension of that feeling, rearing its head again because now i was a member of a new and even more exclusive club, that of the officially-soon-to-be-married.
after experiencing the appointment, however, i know see a bit more clearly. my feeling of not belonging was actually just that i accurately intuited it would not be the sort of bridal experience for me. not that i don't belong because they'll discover i'm actually a terminally single girl who managed to slip through the cracks and find someone to marry her, but because the nature of the appointment did not suit my needs.
though to be fair, according to the research i had done, i thought i had found something within the traditional bridal appointment realm that was different enough that it did suit my needs; it's not like i just went in blind! i knew for sure that a totally traditional bridal appointment was not the right match for me: the made-to-order dresses would take too long for my timeline, and would likely be primarily out of my budget anyway.
i remember watching say yes to the dress when i was younger and having it seared into my brain that any budget under 2k was impossible to work with in these sorts of bridal stores. i know what wedding dresses can cost! i also knew that no dress could be magical enough to persuade me to consider spending far above budget—i knew i could be happy with a cheaper dress!
anyway, even if the appointment had been exactly how i had expected it to be given what i booked (with only in-budget, off-the-rack dresses showed to me), i realized that it still would not have been the experience for me, due to one thing: the pressure. the format of the appointment itself is such that there is inherently pressure to buy. you get an entire hour+ dedicated to just you, with the help of a professional stylist, and if you don't buy anything, then the stylist basically just wasted that hour on you. so there's a bit of an adversarial undercurrent, one might say, as the stylist as i had somewhat competing incentives.
this became extremely clear when we visited the next store, and experienced what felt like exactly the right sort of bridal shopping environment for me—exclusively off-the-rack dresses at lower prices with no pressure but still help from a stylist in what turned out to also be one-on-one help as we were the only ones in the store!
if i had to go back and change anything though, i don't think i would. even though the traditional bridal appointment wasn't for me in the end, i think if i hadn't tried it, i would still wonder if maybe that would have been super fun and lovely. this way, i got to get that out of my system first, let it thoroughly disappoint me, then be primed to be perfectly satisfied with finding my dress at the next store.
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