BWhen one of her fellow bridesmaids was “fired” from her role and then uninvited from the wedding, Kate knew she was in for a stressful few months. “I was a little worried about the intensity of the whole situation,” she says of the time leading up to her friend Stella’s wedding. “I think weddings are something to look forward to and should bring a sense of joy, but I was worried about all the stress. I didn’t get the impression that she was enjoying it.”

Kate was tasked with organising the hen weekend for around 25 friends. The bride made it clear that she did not expect to contribute anything. “I didn’t quite understand how much she was entitled to be treated as a bride-to-be,” says Kate. During discussions about where they could stay so that all the guests could be accommodated within budget, Stella told Kate that she was not doing a good enough job as organiser. “She said, ‘You are not meeting the quality I expect.’ It sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but we were in the thick of it at the time.”

On the Saturday night of the weekend, after a couple of long days, they went to a nightclub, but the guests were tired and had drunk too much; they were exhausted. “She wasn’t happy about it because she wanted it to be an all-nighter, a legendary experience,” says Kate. “She was really upset and we ended up in the toilets with her crying and saying it wasn’t good enough.”

Kate was told that it was her responsibility to make sure everyone had more fun, and that if the other hens still didn’t seem to be having fun, they would be kicked out – not from the nightclub, but from the rest of the weekend so the bride-to-be wouldn’t have to see them in the morning. “I was pretty exhausted by that,” Kate says, tending towards understatement.

For the wedding itself, Kate paid for the bridesmaid’s dress as well as the hairdresser and make-up artist. In total, she probably spent well over £1,000 on her friend’s wedding. However, they are no longer friends. Some time later, she says, “I was dumped. It was like excommunicating the first bridesmaid.”

BWedding season is at its peak and disgruntled bridesmaids may be considering how much they will have to pay financially and emotionally for a bridal shower. A recent post on the forum Reddit asking if it was normal to be charged $300 (£240) to attend a bridal shower was the latest of many horror stories to go viral there. On the Reddit board r/weddingshaming, bridesmaids tell stories of being sentenced to diets, small fortunes or weekly check-ups.

Kate was one of many women who responded to a Guardian appeal asking about their distressing experiences as a bridesmaid. She feared her story might sound a little misogynistic – “the bridezilla cliche” – but she knows Stella’s behaviour was “not reasonable”. Of course, the problem is not limited to women, she adds. “Men behave appallingly too.”

Jo was asked to be a bridesmaid by a childhood friend she had almost lost touch with. She was surprised at first and agreed, then tried to extricate herself from the affair: “We had a most unpleasant conversation. She told me what a bad friend I had been and that I should be grateful that she had asked me to do it.”

Jo had short hair, but the bride-to-be demanded that she grow it out. At the wedding five months later, “I had this really weird hairstyle that was neither a bob nor a pixie cut.” When the bride’s mother saw Jo, she was not impressed, as if Jo had not made enough effort to grow her hair out. After that, their friendship became just as distant as before.

Other respondents described being surprised and hurt by the hierarchy of who gets chosen as maid of honour or maid of honour, which sometimes made them rethink friendships that had lasted decades. Some realised it was a last-minute replacement choice. One woman was delighted when she was asked, but then found that six others had declined. Another had to do two hen parties for a single wedding, one of them abroad: “It will be a real test of whether my friendship with the bride can survive the wedding.”

Others speak of the tyranny of the WhatsApp group, where everyone else greets hen party escalations with enthusiasm and heart emojis rather than pointing out that the agreed budget is long forgotten. One woman who loves being a bridesmaid – she’s had the pleasure eight times in 10 years – says she does it mainly to help keep hen party costs down: “All eight of my experiences have not been as financially jarring as some of the hen parties I’ve been invited to as a guest.” A survey last year found that the average cost of a bridesmaid in the UK is £665.

This is not a new phenomenon. In the ’90s, Julie was so exhausted by the endless demands of being a bridesmaid that she ended up at her friend’s wedding, exhausted and in pain, three weeks after giving birth, breastfeeding her newborn on the toilet with her dress around her ankles.

The bride, Val, had persuaded Julie to keep her diary free for about 18 months – and forego her annual leave – while she figured out exactly when her special day should take place. During that time, Julie became pregnant. Val decided on the due date, but insisted that Julie be there. “She suggested I could get around that; I could induce labor earlier or something,” Julie says. “I said, ‘No, it’s not going to work like that.'”

A bachelorette party when you were seven months pregnant was no fun, especially since Julie was the driver. She managed to avoid the bridal shower that followed, where everyone was expected to bring gifts – which was just as well, because then she went into labor. Julie gave birth three weeks early.

Why didn’t she just call off the wedding? “Because I was still trying to maintain a friendship. That’s when she made it clear, ‘If you don’t come, I’m never speaking to you again.’ It felt like, OK, this is so important to her, I can get through it.” The friendship finally ended a few months later when Julie refused to go to a post-honeymoon party. Val wrote her a letter saying, “You obviously think this baby is more important than me.” Julie laughs. “I say, Oh well.”

It’s surprising, says wedding planner Mark Niemierko, how many relationships between brides and bridesmaids don’t last. He says this is especially the case with people in their 20s. “It’s not that they fight, but if you ask them 10 years later, ‘Would this person still be a bridesmaid or best man?’ they wouldn’t do it. That’s life; you move on.” So if you’re balking at a barrage of unreasonable requests and mounting costs, keep in mind that in 10 years you might not even be friends.

FFor many people, celebrating a couple’s day is a chore, but being a wedding guest is a chore, no matter how much you want to be. “You have to get an outfit, you might need time off work, transportation, and maybe childcare,” Niemierko says. For bridesmaids, the tasks – shopping for and trying on dresses, planning the bachelorette party, having to show interest in everything from catering to the playlist – can seem endless.

In the U.S., it’s common for bridesmaids to pay for their own dress, Niemierko says. He’s also witnessed the rise of the party, where bridesmaids are anointed by the bride-to-be: “It’s another excuse for an event. People get invited to tea or something just to be asked.” That could catch on here, he adds. Niemierko has seen bridesmaids take on the role of reassuring the bride on the day, while others “begrudgingly forced into the planning role.” Then there’s friend politics, “where someone has to be a bridesmaid because otherwise it creates all this drama in the friend group.”

Perhaps reflecting the uncomfortable truth that being a bridesmaid can be quite a hassle, brides are having fewer. “Generally, they’re fed up with the whole ‘I’m going to have six or more women in the same dress’ thing. I would say it’s become more popular to have just one bridesmaid.” Or, better yet, opt for just children: “That’s more elegant – and they’re cute.”

When Elena was asked to be a bridesmaid for her friend Ava, she didn’t expect to have to spend so much money. But Ava made a lot more money than Elena, and the costs mounted. The designer dress Elena was to wear (and pay for) cost two months’ rent; with the cost of her hair and makeup that day, she could have paid another month’s rent.

“I didn’t say anything,” Elena says. “I was too embarrassed. I didn’t know how to broach the subject without giving the impression that I didn’t want anything to do with it. I admit I should have set boundaries, but I didn’t know how.” She couldn’t afford to buy her friend an additional gift, which made her even more worried.

For Kat, being a bridesmaid three times a year was a financial disaster. She had to pay part of the cost on a credit card and live frugally throughout the year to pay for the costs. She ended up spending about a quarter of her annual salary on these weddings.

It had become common practice in her circle of friends for bridesmaids to pay for their own dresses and to spend hen parties abroad. “One of the other bridesmaids and I would always complain together, but generally I felt like I couldn’t complain about the price because there was a kind of groupthink and everyone just said how lovely it was.”

At one bachelorette party, she ordered a bowl of soup because she couldn’t afford anything else. “I was honored to be asked, but I was frustrated by the high price,” she says. Just as her finances were getting back on track the following year, she was asked to be a bridesmaid again.

Some names have been changed