The ceremony is designer chic and color-coded for glamour. Bridezilla's bridesmaids rinse their blond hair in bottle tones of carefully matching shades. They're bucking a trend. The latest Census Bureau figures show that the nation's 54.5 million married couples, with or without children, make up barely half of American households. Fewer than a quarter of these households consist of married couples with children.
Cohabitation is up, marital bliss is down, and early marriage is out.
Both men and women are marrying later. The numbers of single fathers grew, too, and single-father families now make up 2.1 percent of all American households, an increase of 62 percent in the 1990s. We can laugh at Bridezilla, the neurotic, obsessively driven perfectionist who sees life as performance, a page out of Vogue, an advertisement out of a Victoria's Secret catalog. It's easier for a control freak to control a wedding than a marriage. As the reality of marriage settles in, Bridezillas, like the rest of us, learn the hard way that there's lots they can't control after the flowers wilt and the champagne goes flat.