A bridesmaid drew disturbed Reddit users to her post about wanting the bride to reveal her tattoos in a conservative Asian wedding.
The anonymous user shared her post on the Bridezilla Reddit community. The subreddit gives members a place to tell the stories of anger, drama, and jealousy that often surround wedding planning.
Disagreements over showing off tattoos
The bridesmaid begins the post explaining that her friend, the 28-year-old bride is getting married in an SEA country. Notably, she also mentions that her country in South East Asia is conservative, and tattoos are seen as ‘uncouth’. However, the bridesmaid reveals early on that she has full tattoo sleeves, which means the ink covers her entire arms.
“I have full sleeves, while Hadley has a few small ones in her inner arm & ribs, which are easily hidden,” she writes.
The bride’s family doesn’t know about them, but apparently that is no excuse for the bridesmaid who asserts her own morals. She states that she believes the bride is ‘restricting her own autonomy by conforming to their ideology.’
“She vocally disagrees with her parents when they make a rude remark about people with tattoos, but keeps up the facade that she has no tattoos, which honestly makes her look like a hypocrite.”
Covering up the evidence
While the introduction to the post exists in the realm of opinion and is not really doing anybody any harm, she continues. Before the wedding, they both went out to try on wedding dresses, along with the bride’s stepmother. The issue, she writes, is that the bride would only select wedding dresses which hid her tattoos.
Despite the bridesmaid repeatedly offering her friend to try on more revealing dresses, she would not give in. Apparently the bride made excuses saying that she wasn’t happy about showing off her arms, and not ‘confident’. This bothered the bridesmaid who argued that any tattoo artist would ‘love for their pieces to be seen’. Particularly, she believed that she was disrespecting the artist by ‘covering it up’.
“And what’s the point of getting tattoos if you don’t show them off?” she wrote. “She paid a lot of money to get them done & they look absolutely beautiful.”
She admits that while her siblings agree that she might have overstepped her boundaries in the matter, her tattoo friends don’t. She mentions that they understood her point of view, and agreed that the bride was being disrespectful. This may have justified the bridesmaid’s actions to herself, but the reddit community couldn’t help but chime in.
“I rolled my eyes so hard it hurt. How absolutely ridiculous. All of her friends and bf are right that she should get over herself,” one user wrote.
Another commented sarcastically saying that the entire post was an ego boost. “It’s a really long way to say “I have tattoos. Is there somebody here I haven’t spoken to about my tattoos yet?”
One member made a point of settling the matter, explaining that it’s the bride’s choice and that should be respected.
Foreigners look for Asian dating
The Bridezilla group is full of wedding blunders and disastrous disagreements that sometimes end the wedding altogether. But despite the conservative nature of Southeast Asian countries, many westerners are finding ways to meet women of Asia. And as more people are finding love through the internet, web communities like DatesOfAsia.com or even a popular hook-up app might connect an unconventional Asian woman with less judgmental outsiders.
A recent study done by the popular dating app Momo said that more expats are using the app to find women of Asia. According to Sun Yang, Momo’s public relations director, “It gives people the opportunity to talk and communicate to see if they have the same interests, and if their general viewpoints click before they meet in person to see if they are right for each other.”
The opportunity to get to know each other first is especially important when meeting women from a different culture. The bridesmaid posting in the Bridezilla forum was only sharing her frustration with the conservative values of those around her. That’s why Asian dating could take a little more conversation than usual to understand where the other person is coming from.
Story by Fernando Villa
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