Josie Santi started thinking about the “bridezilla” concept the second she got engaged. “Not because I suddenly became difficult, but because I became hyper-aware of how much messaging exists telling women not to become difficult,” said Santi, who is based in Los Angeles and is the host of “The Everygirl Podcast.”

The portmanteau of “bride” and “Godzilla”, coined by Boston Globe columnist Diane White in 1995, has solidified itself in the mainstream vernacular as a way to denigrate brides perceived as difficult — there’s even a reality TV series of the same name.

After getting engaged in December 2024, Santi remembers seeing articles with titles like “How to solve an issue with your planners without being a bridezilla” in her social media feeds, and quietly taking note of their advice to “be excited, but not demanding. Have a vision, but don’t be too specific. Plan an Instagram-perfect wedding, but don’t ask too much in order to get it.”

The message came through loud and clear: “Whatever this process required of me, I was expected to carry it gracefully and quietly,” Santi noted of the milestone event which expects women “to care enormously, invest emotionally [and] financially, make hundreds of decisions, manage emotional labor and family dynamics…and then be mocked if the pressure shows.”

At one point, she even found herself asking her mom if she thought her thorough edits on the couple’s save-the-date cards made her “seem like a bridezilla” and feared her feedback to the designer made her come off as too picky.

Thus, “I became interested in whether ‘bridezilla’ is actually describing unreasonable behavior, or whether it’s just a sexist shorthand for a woman visibly carrying an enormous amount she was never meant to carry alone,” said Santi.

She’s not the only woman pushing back on the deriding moniker. Sanam Hafeez, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist and founder of Comprehend the Mind psychological services in Forest Hills, said that the term carries a misogynistic undertone, “since there’s no widely-used male equivalent despite grooms having equal capacity for unreasonable behavior.”

Plus, added Hafeez, it also places the burden of blame on the bride while largely ignoring the enormous cultural pressure women face to orchestrate a “perfect” event that often involves months of high-stakes (and high price) logistics while managing everyone else’s expectations.

It’s not that (all) men don’t care. Santi, who is tying the knot in Chicago in August 2026, stressed that her fiancé genuinely wants to be involved in wedding planning. Even still, with his tremendous support and her own feminist manifesto, the responsibility and pressure concentrates in Santi’s direction, she said. “Not because of our dynamic, but because the structure surrounding wedding planning assumes the bride as the center of gravity and the groom a supporting character day-of.”

To this point, Santi cites seemingly small things — such as vendors defaulting to emailing her first, or family members bringing questions and opinions directly to her— as subtly reinforcing that brides are the central point person, whether or not that was consciously assigned.

“There are dozens of bridal magazines on the shelves but not one titled ‘groom.’ ”

Josie Santi

“The more invisible labor that accumulates around the bride, the less tolerance there seems to be for the inevitable strain it produces,” said Santi, noting that there is a particular unfairness about being both the architect of an entire event and also the most scrutinized.

Wedding planners, in particular, are sometimes privy to controlling brides who actually do rear their ugly heads. Reneille Velez, wedding planner and founder of Gian, an events company based in Seattle, said a version of the overly demanding bride is very real. It looks like 1 a.m. texts, demands far outside the scope of planning and staff being yelled at, she said, ticking off examples of bridal requests for planners like managing in-laws’ flights, running personal errands the week-of (like dry cleaning, or walking her dog during the rehearsal.)

Velez and her team, like countless other wedding planning firms, have gone so far as to write a “bridezilla clause” into the company’s contract. “Sometimes, despite every vetting call and red-flag check, the dynamic shifts after signing in a way no one could have predicted,” she said. “When that happens, the clause gives us a clean way to step back. We don’t invoke it often, but we wouldn’t run a business without it,” added Velez, admitting that the clause implies punishing “women for the exact engagement we’d praise in any other professional context.”

When asked if the phrase “bridezilla” is unfair, wedding planner Samantha Goldberg of Samantha Goldberg & Co. in New York said she believes it’s more than merited in some circumstances. “Honestly, have you seen Godzilla? They do have similar behaviors and [these women] make it known even when they are wrong, they are right,” said Goldberg, who knows firsthand how stressful wedding planning can be, having planned more than 5,000 of them.

Every now and then, brides-to-be “take things to levels of entitlement I only see with a toddler who doesn’t know how to express frustration,” said Goldberg. “This one day isn’t about entitlement, it’s about the joining of family and friends to celebrate love … Some people forget about this. They also understand they are at a point of no return and they are absolutely with this.”

At the end of the day, Velez believes a bride with high standards isn’t a bridezilla.
“She’s a host.”

And as any dinner party entertainer knows — while rewarding — being a host is exhausting.

“Wedding planning often involves a massive amount of emotional labor that we don’t typically recognize as labor because it’s wrapped in aesthetics, celebration and femininity,” said Santi. “In addition to the actual planning — which, depending on the level of support you can afford, can feel like a full-time job — you are navigating family sensitivities, considering everyone’s comfort and experience and absorbing the emotional pressure of making a milestone moment feel meaningful for dozens or hundreds of people.”

Santi summed it up by saying that what looks like stress about seating charts is often not actually about seating charts at all, it’s about responsibility, expectation, identity and who ends up carrying the emotional load in a couple.

“What if bridezilla behavior is actually just a woman responding to unacknowledged and unshared workload, intensified by an industry that markets exclusively to her?” asked Santi. “There are dozens of bridal magazines on the shelves but not one titled ‘groom.’ ”