You think you’re safe. You think that age and frailty offer you a certain protection from certain horrors. And then, just as your defenses are starting to weaken – bang! Someone surprises you with an invitation to a hen party.
A hen party! At my age! A hen party, really, at any age after… well, 33, I would suggest. 35 is the absolute upper limit. And that’s when it’s your first – and you and your colleagues still believe, only – wedding and the full measure of generosity, spirit and youthful energy can be applied. After that – stop it.
The wedding I’ve been invited to is for a second marriage and lasts three days. A long car journey (or expensive train journey), a hotel, a big banquet dinner one night, spa treatments the next day (book yourself – the bride pays for none of this) and everything in between with hen parties. Games And Activities. Then a long car ride (or expensive train ride) back; exhausted, hungover, and full of resentment at the wasted time, you find your home and children in a state of devastation because three days without the family CEO is, in the twisted chronology of these things, at least a week too long.
There is some excuse for this nonsense in your twenties (you’re too young to get married in your twenties, but that’s a discussion for another time — though send me a return envelope if you want my 20-page list of bullet points on the subject) and early thirties. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, and the wedding industrial complex has harnessed and weaponized it with an efficiency that has given the Manhattan Project pause.
I was dead set against a big wedding and ended up walking down the aisle of a decent church in a decent dress to a decent priest and his vows, witnessed by a hundred guests, not really knowing how it had happened. A series of seemingly small, innocuous decisions are secretly transformed by unknown forces until you’re standing there, holding a bouquet of flowers, turning your zombie head from side to side to smile at people you don’t recognize without your glasses, hoping that in your dazed state you’ll at least get something to eat and drink for afterwards.
But today? Now, in our forties and fifties, we should be able to say no to this and all other crap. That’s the promise we’re given in exchange for social invisibility, creeping sexual uselessness, and increasing hirsutism. And by and large, we can and do. We call out more vendors when the lines form, we refuse to pay workers until we’re satisfied with the work, we unleash our mumface on other people’s naughty children on the bus, and we save our high heels for occasions so special they never happen.
The problem with hen parties is that we don’t all get to such a blissful state at the same time, and this friend is lagging behind. She still cares, god bless her, about doing the right thing, doing the expected thing, what people think of her and her choices. She’s on a diet for the wedding, she’s overspent on everything from the venue to the canapés, and the three-part hen party is what she knows and the three-part hen party is what she’s going to do, even if it kills her, and us too, which it probably will. I’ve heard rumours that she wants us to go clubbing on the last night. I’d laugh if it didn’t feel like a real possibility.
The rest of the hen gang is also horrified by the whole prospect. So I think it’s our duty now to take control of the event. We’ll meet at the hotel, of course. But then we’ll stage an intervention, not a party. We’ll beat her up like a gang of menopausal marines in those three days and rebuild her in our image. We’ll save her from the many wasted years she has ahead of her, during which she’ll not give a damn about anything. We’ll free her from societal expectations. We’ll free her from all her internalized mores.
We’ll show her a life beyond fear and – eventually – she’ll thank us for it. Her fiancé might need more persuasion when he sees her trotting down the aisle in tinted moisturiser, flats and a John Lewis ANYDAY jumpsuit that she can wear for years afterwards (unless we get the deposit back from the damn cathedral she apparently booked), but that’s his problem.
The important point is that the hen party does what a hen party is supposed to do – demonstrate the deep loyalty between friends, show the bride-to-be that they will always have her back, whatever married life throws at her. And more importantly, it means I don’t have to pay for a massage, drink more than the two glasses of wine I can afford, and – unimaginably – go clubbing. Time and money well spent.
