"Death of a Bachelor[ette]"
A rambling analysis of my bachelorette party weekend: how it came to be and what it means to me.
[Cue the Panic! At the Disco song referenced in the title]
Hello, subscribers!
It’s been a while since I’ve put something out on Substack—and I deeply apologize. April and May were wildly busy. I’m glad you’re still here reading and hope to be a little more consistent from here on out.
I’ve got a lot of stuff left in draft due to fears that “it’s not good enough!” but I’m hoping to get over that sense of inadequacy and start posting here again. I couldn’t tell you what you’ll start seeing here precisely, whether it’s robust essays, casual blog-style posts, specific ideas I am chewing on, general musings, or simply recaps and cross-posts of writing I am doing elsewhere. Regardless, I hope you’ll continue join me on the journey.
This week, I hope you enjoy this reflection on the planning, celebrating, and meaning of a significant party: specifically, my bachelorette party.
If you have any thoughts on something from this piece that struck you or resonated with you, comment in the thread. If you liked what you read or know someone who might like it, too, share it!
The bittersweet thing about planning anything related to my wedding is that I am simultaneously very supported and very lonely in planning it.
I moved to the Atlanta Metro Area just over a year ago, and while I’ve made good friends here, my dearest friends are scattered across the country and most of my family (both blood family and the people I call family) is a flight away. Anyone I would want to call on for wedding help requires an actual phone call, and, ideally, some combination of planes, trains, and automobiles to be in the same room: I am much better with onsite accountability in hammering out the details of playlists and guest lists.
All of this is to say that many people I love, who know me well, and who are most invested in celebrating my impending marriage are not exactly close at hand, and if I had had one whim for the bachelorette party, it was to use the pull of a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime event to bring those people back into my orbit.
As I see it, only two events have the kind of gravitational force of potential to bring people of all parts of your life and all parts of your world to you: weddings and funerals.
If I were to add a third event, I might throw in a coming-of-age kind of party into the mix like a bar/bat mitzvah, quinceanera, sweet sixteen, but in those cases…
Your life is so short that it is fairly easy to gather everyone who might have mattered to you for a party.
Your parents are probably the ones planning the party and spending money for it. You are consulted, not responsible for making the whole gala happen.
If I were to add a fourth event, I might add something like a graduation or a birth, but while those kinds of ceremonial events or rites of passage have meaningful pull, they tend to be more family-centric in nature than friend- and wider-circle-inclined.
I digress: the punchline here is that I wanted to make the most of my bachelorette party as a significantly-powerful opportunity to bring people to me who no longer live near me. I made my decision to move elsewhere and start my life over, and while I don’t regret the decision, it had its consequences, the most heartbreaking one being abandoning proximity to a lot of people I cared about. Having people take you up on your invitation to “come visit” is a lot harder when there’s a flight separating you than just a ride on the subway.
So if there was one goal of my bachelorette party, it was to seize the unique opportunity to have people “come visit”: to show many people I love where in the country I ended up, why I ended up here, and to welcome them into my new life.
If I had not given much thought to the prospect of my own wedding until I got engaged, I had given even less thought to the prospect of my own bachelorette party.
While I can probably count the number of weddings I have attended on at least two hands, I can count the number of bachelorette festivities I have attended on one hand (three in total) and count the number of bachelorette parties I have coordinated on one finger (a destination fête in South Beach on a steamy July weekend, six years ago).
The one-time project management of a bachelorette party gave me a window into all the problems that could happen (financial, logistical, interpersonal), and the three-time attendance of bachelorette parties gave me a sense of what I liked and did not like, which stereotypes of the bachelorette experience I was happy or at least willing to indulge and which ones I wanted to avoid.
My personal “requirements list” for the party was fairly simple:
I wanted an equal balance of raucous and relaxing.
I wanted to spend it with as many people I loved who would be willing to make the time and make the trip to wherever I chose to host the party.
I was willing to wear a sash and get a lap dance, so long as the latter was not on video.
I cast a net of close to fifteen people from out of town whom I believed could realistically attend given schedule, geography, and desire. I ended up with seven of the out-of-towners in the mix: the coworker-turned-eleven-year friend, one of my first-ever training partners in jiu-jitsu, the best friend I made on the road trip, and a fraction of the squad of women I met during my last six months of training in Boston. In addition to the out-of-towner cohort, I had almost all the women with whom I train jiu-jitsu in Atlanta attend the festivities on the Friday night.
The weekend was structured simply: stereotypical shenanigans on Friday, meals and mellowness on Saturday, and heading home Sunday into Monday (depending on individual flight plans). For a more detailed itinerary:
Friday-Saturday: an evening in downtown Atlanta at Ponce City Market–a food hall with a rooftop that has mini golf, carnival-style games, and at least one bar–followed by a visit to the historic establishment known as the Clermont Lounge. The Clermont Lounge checks two boxes: one for “Stopping by and Enjoying a True Atlanta Landmark” and another for “Bachelorette Parties Traditionally Include Strippers.”
Saturday-Sunday/Monday: brunch and a drive up to Northern Georgia to relax at a rented cabin and enjoy each other’s company with limited wifi but plenty of snacks, poolside banter, card games, and movies. We spend a handful of moments away from the cabin exploring the Main Streets of a few mountain towns (Blue Ridge and Ellijay) to get dinner, coffee, and souvenirs, but we mostly stay put due to the beauty and peace of the cabin and the precariousness of the two-mile home stretch to the cabin: an unpaved road with a very steep incline.
As the weekend moves from “up ahead on the calendar” to “in the rear view mirror,” I’m feeling a few different things:
Relieved: Everyone who came to celebrate got along: no drama, no splitting of hairs over finances, no big messes to clean up. If there were problems or altercations between partygoers or with the party itself, I didn’t have to task myself with managing the solutions–a thing to celebrate in itself. Even if I wanted to handle any of the logistics or operations, for the most part, I couldn’t: some Apple bug prevented me from engaging in the primary group chat where those kinds of conversations were
Sobered up: Fortunately, I was the only mess to be cleaned up during the weekend: I tend to find myself in a situation where I end up drinking to the point of unwitting sickness roughly once every three years, and it probably makes sense that the bachelorette party would take its rightful place as the latest instance. Short of spending Saturday morning vomiting up the remains of Friday night, the weekend was great–and I’ve already reached the point of laughing about how awful I felt.
Grateful: I got a full spectrum of wonderful people at the festivities, people who range across a pretty defining era of my life and who have seen me through multiple milestones and evolutions of self. If I were to break those evolutions and categories down, they would include:
People who got to know me in my twenties and people to got to know me in my thirties
People who met me before I BJJ had entered my life and people who find it hard to imagine a time when it was not a part of my life
People who knew me when I was still dating rampantly (before I met my fiancé) and people who met me and my fiancé and essentially perceive us as a (somewhat peculiar, “opposites attract” kind of) package deal.
People who knew me when my dad was alive and people who only knew me after that loss.
People who knew me before the road trip and people who met me after it.
I like to think I have some pretty awesome friends, and when my awesome friends are complimenting me (and each other) about my awesome friends, it validates that thinking.
People sometimes speak of bachelorette parties and weddings as “the end” of things: of fun, of your good, young life as you know it. One of my colleagues did so as recently as this morning, and while he is something of a sarcastic and Eeyore-ish character, his view isn’t uncommon.
I prefer to think of the bridal pomp and circumstance in a way that one of my party guests, who grew up in Spain, does. She told me that “Bachelor Party” or “Bachelorette Party” in Spanish translates to a “Despedida de Soltera,” which is very poetic. “Despedida de Soltera” is a phrase I would loosely and poetically translate as “A Farewell to Singlehood.”
Adopting that perspective, I try not to see my bachelorette party as a downer and life-ender. It marks the beginning of another transition, another shift in identity, not too dissimilar to those shifts that those who attended my party had already witnessed in my life. As far as transitions go, it is perhaps the most significant one of my life ahead of becoming a parent, but it does not have to be a bad thing or a “life-ender.”
Speaking from a place of innocence and perhaps naivety, my sincerest hope is that, like the other transitions of my life, what is gained in marriage by building a life and growing old with a single someone makes up for the inevitable losses: of youth, freedom, choices–not to mention collagen, flexibility, one’s natural hair color.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this weekend, it’s that I hope I can keep as many of these people in my life as possible for as long as I possibly can–which will mean that I will need to find reasons, else schedule deliberate opportunities, to stay connected with folks far and wide across my life.
I do not want—and will not allow—my wedding and my funeral to be the only upcoming occasions to bring together the people I’ve loved from across my life.
Closing out, to those reading this who were able to attend the party, from both near and far: thank you for investing the time, energy, effort, and funds to see me and celebrate. It means more than you know.
The best I can do to show my residual and ongoing affection is breaking my silence on Substack with a rambling “done is better than perfect” kind of essay that hardly rivals the loving hotel rooftop video you all made while I was passing out in bed on Friday night.
Basking in the champagne afterglow, I am fortunate and privileged to know you and love you.