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From unflattering dresses to costly bachelorette weekends, the burdens of being a bridesmaid have been well documented. But there’s one wedding role that hasn’t been talked about enough: the rare, unfortunate “personal attendant.”
Sometimes compared to a modern-day “lady-in-waiting,” a personal attendant is a close friend or family member who caters directly to the bride, and often the bridesmaids, on the wedding day. Their tasks can be as small as delivering bobby pins, holding purses during photos, and making sure the bride drinks water, or they can have larger responsibilities, like running coffee orders for the entire bridal party and herding extended relatives for pictures. Not technically part of the wedding party, they don’t shoulder the price of a bridesmaid dress, but they are also absent from professional photos and the head table.
In my home state of Minnesota, a personal attendant is seen as a standard part of a wedding, but many people outside of the Midwest have never heard of the title (or they assign those tasks to a concierge service). While the origins of the personal attendant are surprisingly difficult to trace, a search of Minnesota wedding announcements reveals that the term appeared regularly by the mid-1950s, around the time postwar weddings were growing more elaborate, with expanded guest lists, caterers, florists, and photographers. Mentions of a personal attendant were especially common from the 1970s through the 1990s, spreading to Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Since then, that number has tapered, but many weddings I’ve attended in Minnesota still have them. Sydney Wilton, a wedding planner and owner of My Event Buddee, which serves the Twin Cities, estimates that about 25 percent of the weddings she plans have a designated personal attendant. Though it’s unclear why this role appears mainly in the upper Midwest, it could be connected to our strong Lutheran and Catholic ties, which value community and practicality. Having a personal attendant ensures that things get done, and it’s a way to include someone who may have felt left out.
There’s just one problem: Many personal attendants dread this setup. Message boards lean negative about the tradition, accusing brides of enlisting their friends as “free labor.” It can also feel like a slight if you expected to be part of the actual wedding party. But it can be a positive experience, too: Jessica, 39, a personal attendant from Mound, Minnesota, said, “I think it’s an honorable role. It was a gift to get the call asking to be the guiding light for a bride.” One 29-year-old bride, Lizzy, from the Twin Cities, asked a trio of her closest friends to be personal attendants because she had already racked up eight bridesmaids and “11 girls was simply out of the question.” Her three attendants filled garden pots for the church, helped her pee in her dress, and carried her shoes and veil between locations. “They helped me through in more ways than I can think of,” Lizzy told me. Even in cases where the answer to this request is less than enthusiastic, similar to the begrudged bridesmaid role, many accept this responsibility in support of a friend, though it’s often unclear exactly what the role will look like or how it will feel until they are in it.
When my college friend, Joelle (not her real name), asked me to be her personal attendant, I was honored. We’d been close since living in the freshman dorms, and I had visited her family’s dairy farm in eastern Minnesota on multiple occasions. Three of our mutual friends along with Joelle’s sister-in-law made up the bridal party, and I was excited for a mini college reunion, imagining we’d stay out drinking after the reception and fall asleep together on one bed like we had in college. I assumed the only reason I wasn’t a bridesmaid was because there weren’t enough groomsmen to go around.
The bachelorette party was my first indication that bridesmaids and personal attendants carried more than a superficial difference. The party took place on a Saturday afternoon at Joelle’s farm, a three-hour drive from the Twin Cities. I texted a bridesmaid friend to ask if she wanted to carpool. “Sorry, I’m driving up the night before,” she responded. My neck stiffened. After a few more messages, I learned the rest of my friends would be spending the whole weekend, and I was the only person driving there and back in one day. I debated not going, but I wanted to show up for Joelle. Maybe it hadn’t been her call not to include me.
I gritted my teeth and drove up. I drank prosecco and chatted with friends on the lawn while Joelle unwrapped packages of lingerie. Later, when Joelle and I were alone in the kitchen, I couldn’t help mentioning I was “a little taken aback” that I wasn’t invited to spend the weekend. “Oh, I was just thinking bridesmaids,” Joelle said, her eyebrows shooting up. She gestured to the cluster of her childhood friends outside. “Otherwise, I’d have to invite everyone.” We walked through the sliding glass door to rejoin the rest of the party. So it had been her decision, I noted. She also seemed to view a personal attendant as closer to a regular guest.
On the wedding day, I watched Joelle and the bridesmaids get ready in the church basement, delivering setting spray and paper cups of orange juice when appropriate. I ran to get a bridesmaid’s shoes out of her car and snapped candid getting-ready photos on my phone. When Joelle asked if I could tie a rosary around her bouquet, I looped the beads three times around the ribboned stems and handed it back to her. “Uh, what about a safety pin?” Joelle’s sister-in-law said, staring at me with one arm around Joelle’s shoulders. Disconcerted, I searched random drawers to no avail. Two of my other friends shared an unreadable look. I wondered if I wasn’t meeting my unspoken personal attendant requirements by not arriving with safety pins on me.
As the wedding party posed for photos outside the church, I hovered to the side, waiting for instructions. “Lizzie, can you grab the umbrellas?” a friend yelled when it started to drizzle. I returned damp and breathless with an armful of bubble umbrellas and took their bouquets so they had one arm free. I was the dedicated errand girl, included and excluded at the same time while they laughed in matching dresses, like Cinderella primping her stepsisters for the ball. Later, a toilet in the church bathroom refused to flush, and it was my job to track down paper and markers to make an “out of order” sign. After hurrying back to the group, I overheard my friends say they were sleeping at Joelle’s farm that night. My lungs deflated. I had booked myself a hotel room. Again, I wasn’t part of the inner circle.
At the reception, my friends did silly dances for their grand entrance and then settled at the head table while I watched from my seat in the back. I clapped for speeches but couldn’t enjoy myself. After a morning of errands, I felt unappreciated, unwanted, and at the same time, worried I was being a bad friend. I believe in enthusiastically showing up for loved ones, and I would have been happy assisting Joelle if it were clear I was no less of a friend to her. Even though it’s hard for a bride to show appreciation for everyone, it would have been easy to include me in the sleeping arrangements or assure me she didn’t care about a safety pin. My main grievance, though, was that my friend didn’t talk to me unless she needed something. If I had just been invited as a guest, I would have enjoyed the wedding, feeling like it was me she wanted there, not my ability to fetch umbrellas. I forced myself to dance to a few songs before disappearing to my hotel room early.
I’m not the only personal attendant who felt hurt by the experience. Lynette, 25, from St. Paul, was a personal attendant for a friend she’d been close with through high school and college. The bride popped the question at a dinner with all of the women chosen to be part of her day.
“Everyone opened their cards to ‘Will you be my bridesmaid?,’ but mine said, ‘Will you be my personal attendant?’ ” Lynette told me. “I felt like I was about to cry at that moment, and not happy tears. I felt offended sitting next to eight other women and being the only one to not walk down the aisle and stand beside her.” Lynette performed her wedding-day duties, arriving at the venue early with the rings and invitations for flat photography shots, coordinating photos with the bridal party, and making sure the groom didn’t see the bride until the first look. Though she wore the same dress as the bridesmaids, the caveat of not standing at the altar felt insulting to the friendship she cherished for many years. Now Lynette is planning her own wedding and making sure she’s conscious of other people’s feelings, which for her means not having a personal attendant. “If I can help make someone not feel how I felt, I absolutely will,” she said.
Tanya, another Minnesota woman I talked to, noticed a pattern from serving as a bridesmaid over the years. “The attendant has always been that one friend or cousin who didn’t quite make a spot in the actual bridal party. The third wheel in the friend group,” she said. “In some cases, the personal attendant is the overweight one, who doesn’t look as good in wedding pictures.” When Tanya’s close college friend, who’d been the maid of honor in her own wedding, asked Tanya to be her personal attendant, Tanya knew the friendship was over. “I did not refuse, but I also knew where I stood in her mind. I wasn’t good enough for her bridal party, but she needed to ethically give me a role,” she said. “We haven’t spoken since.”
Though being a personal attendant wasn’t as much of a financial sacrifice as being a bridesmaid—no expensive dress, matching shoes, or hairstylist—the real sacrifice for me was an entire day of feeling left out, and this ultimately cost my friendship with Joelle. Weeks later, I received a thank-you note for the gift I bought from Joelle’s registry, and that was it. I never reached out again, and neither did she. We still follow each other on social media but haven’t spoken in years. I recently saw that she was a bridesmaid at another wedding. I hoped there was no personal attendant.
