Mean girls: Is the bridezilla meme fair, or are women simply being overloaded?

Josie Santi started thinking about the “bridezilla” concept the second she got engaged.“Not because I suddenly became difficult, but because I became hyper-aware of how much messaging exists telling women not to become difficult,” said Santi, who is based in Los Angeles and is the host of “The Everygirl Podcast.”The portmanteau of “bride” and “Godzilla”, coined by Boston Globe columnist Diane White in 1995, has solidified itself in the mainstream vernacular as a way to denigrate brides perceived as difficult — there’s even a reality TV series of the same name.After getting engaged in December 2024, Santi remembers seeing articles with titles like “How to solve an issue with your planners without being a bridezilla” in her social media feeds, and quietly taking note of their advice to “be excited, but not demanding.

Have a vision, but don’t be too specific.Plan an Instagram-perfect wedding, but don’t ask too much in order to get it.”The message came through loud and clear: “Whatever this process required of me, I was expected to carry it gracefully and quietly,” Santi noted of the milestone event which expects women “to care enormously, invest emotionally [and] financially, make hundreds of decisions, manage emotional labor and family dynamics…and then be mocked if the pressure shows.”At one point, she even found herself asking her mom if she thought her thorough edits on the couple’s save-the-date cards made her “seem like a bridezilla” and feared her feedback to the designer made her come off as too picky.Thus, “I became interested in whether ‘bridezilla’ is actually describing unreasonable behavior, or whether it’s just a sexist shorthand for a woman visibly carrying an enormous amount she was never meant to carry alone,” said Santi.She’s not the only woman pushing back on the deriding moniker.

Sanam Hafeez, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist and founder of Comprehend the Mind psychological services in Fore...