Early in your book, you talk about what was formerly the "necessary trauma" of weddings, because marriage itself presented such an enormous shift in lifestyle. What form does this trauma take now?

I think that weddings used to be massively significant transitional moments. It used to be the case that marriage was when you left your family home for the first time. This is when you started living with your spouse for the first time, had sex with your spouse for the first timeÑor at least had sex with your spouse for the first time in a way that wasn't furtive or in the back seat of a car or something. And also you became an adult.

Today, we get married -- the average age for a woman is 25 and for a man it's 27 -- and most of us are adults of a sort by then and have already left home and have been self-sufficient in terms of work. So it doesn't mean what it used to mean and it doesn't have the trauma that it used to have. You can imagine a young woman leaving her family home for the first time and going and spending the night in a new place with a new man she's never spent the night with. It might be wonderful. It might be fantastic. But it is also potentially traumatic.

The actual moment of transition doesn't have the significance it used to have. So I think that people have, and I don't think this is a conscious decision necessarily, a habit of investing the wedding and wedding planning with such significance and such importance because the wedding has to feel like a momentous event. Even if you've lived together before and nothing materially changes very much, we want weddings to feel significant. So the traumatic experience of new wedded life is choosing what color your napkin rings are going to be. It's a sort of invented trauma.

Is that connected in some way to proving something to one's family that one's wedding is legitimate?

It's not just proving something to your family; it is proving something to yourself. I think people want to see themselves as brides and grooms in a way to demonstrate to themselves that something big is happening.

I heard a very funny story at a conference I went to of videographers. One videographer didn't just take wedding videos and show up someplace with a camera. He also made video products to have at weddings. He would make what they call "Love Story" or "Courtship" videos of you and your intended that show how you met or pictures of your childhood and he'd have these videos playing at strategic places in the wedding reception so that the whole place would be like an audio-visual celebration of your relationship. And he told a story of a couple who were so enraptured by the [images] of themselves that all they wanted to do throughout their wedding was to sit watching the video, which made it very hard for the person actually shooting the video of the wedding to get any decent [footage] because everyone was just sitting around watching TV.

Why were they so captivated? In some way the video was convincing them that they were becoming husband and wife.

There is also an industry that addresses this hazy trauma and transition we were discussing. There are books like The Conscious Bride where there are exercises and there is a lot of language about "mourning" one's past life as a single person.

Yes, because a lot of people do have this tremendous anxiety about getting married. And there is also this sense of let down that some people, not everybody, have after planning the wedding is over. They've lost the thing that was most central to their lives for the last year and a half.

In the absence of the actual problem, a problem needs to be invented to provide a way for people to navigate this transition.

Yes and I think that the writer of The Conscious Bride, Sheryl Paul, is more interested in the Jungian archetype and I'm more interested in the ways in which this vacuum has been filled by people who are out to sell you something.

To that end, this new character has been developed, the Bridezilla. You describe the industry as despising the Bridezilla yet needing her at the same time because a non-demanding person is useless to vendors.

Yes. Obsessing about whether your chair tie-backs coordinate with the lining of the dress and coordinate with the inside of the envelopes you sent out with the save-the-date invitationsÐ this stuff doesn't just arrive from nowhere.

It comes about because someone is telling you to worry about these things. There's a checklist: "nine months out you have to start worrying about this, six months out you have to start worrying about that. And by the way, we can sell you the things you have been worrying about [needing]." I don't think there's something innate in human beings that makes us worry about the color of envelope linings.

But it is interesting to note that this worrying person, the Bridezilla, has to be awful.

Right. And to see the ways in which wedding planners talk about their clients, not necessarily specifically, but in the abstract, these people who by trade are so ingratiating, kind, and approachableÉ

I went to a party of wedding planners. It was a fancy-dress party where we were all dressed up in 60's clothes and we were dancing to "Do the Locomotion" and things like that. And at this party I was told of an earlier party that was Mexican-themed where there was a pi–ata of a bride. And everyone at the party had gone and struck the pi–ata while shouting out the name of the most appalling client he or she ever had. It was an amazing story of aggression and hostility on the part of people who will otherwise be as lovely as can be to the bride.

Is there any way of imagining a character that may be worrying and obsessed but not hateful, not Bridezilla?

The character of Bridezilla is so interesting. The word started being used around 2001, 2002 and then you started hearing it everywhere: in books and there was that TV show Bridezillas[currently on the WE cable channel].

Everyone understood what it meant. When that happens with a caricature, you have to stop and think about what is going on in the culture that makes this plausible to everybody.

What I think the character reflects is not just the story of individual brides who have gone wild and lost their minds, although that stuff is kind of entertaining to watch on TV. What's really happening is that there's a general sense in the public at large that there's something wrong with the way weddings have gone. Weddings themselves are out of control. It isn't just brides. The whole system is out of control. So we're living in a kind of Bridezilla culture where every bride is encouraged to become a Bridezilla from the moment she's engaged until the minute she's married.

At a seminar I went to for brides that was put on by Brides magazine someone asked: "When should I start getting facials?" And the answer was: "As soon as you get engaged." You're supposed to work on this [wedding planning project] for sixteen or seventeen months, which is the length of the average engagement.

That dovetails with this passion that Americans have with makeovers. There's this idea that when people get engaged the first thing that happens is that women are supposed to examine and correct everything that's wrong with them.

Right. You're going to get married so [you have to] become a different person, or become a better version of yourself. The other week I went to the great Bridal Expo and there were all of these stands offering tooth-whitening services. I didn't see them when I first visited the Bridal Expo three years ago, but now getting your teeth whitened is something you're supposed to do before you get married.

So yes. The wedding industry is very self-conscious about promoting the idea that your engagement period is a period of self-improvement and in fact the publisher of Brides magazine said that very thing to me-that this is how women see this period: as a chance to remake themselves. And [the industry's attitude is] "while you're doing it, here are the products and services that will help you accomplish the goals you don't realize we've set for you."

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