The Anti-Bachelorette
Let’s cut to the chase: most bachelorette parties feel the same.
The bride in white. The sash, the tiara, the matching t-shirts. The penis straws. The same locations, the same photo ops, the same reel that could belong to any bride in any city in any year. This isn’t shade, it’s just an observation about what happens when inspiration gets replaced by template. When planning a bachelorette means scrolling Pinterest until something looks right rather than asking who the bride really is.
And then there’s the cost. One app studied around 100,000 planned trips and found the overall cost of a bachelorette is $10,800 on average. Per person, the average cost in 2023 was $1,400. That’s flights, vacation days, accommodations, activities, and a matching outfit set nobody will wear again, all to recreate a weekend that could have been anyone’s. The hollow feeling on the flight home isn’t just emotional: it’s the specific hollow of having spent real money on something that didn’t quite fit the bride and didn’t feel special.
How we got here
The bachelorette wasn’t always this way.
Bachelor parties date back to 5th century BCE Sparta, formal dinners to honor a comrade. It took the Victorians to add a hint of the forbidden, giving the groom one last chance to say goodbye to the friends his wife might not approve of once he was wed.
Women didn’t get their own version for a very long time. It wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that women began to enjoy a proper bachelorette party experience. Before that, pre-wedding festivities were limited to the bridal shower. The bachelorette party as we know it, the destination weekend, the group activities, the whole production, didn’t truly take hold until after Princess Diana married Prince Charles in 1981. Some 750 million people watched that wedding, and overnight, weddings became noticeably bigger affairs. The attendant parties quickly followed suit. As sociologist Beth Montemurro puts it: “There’s this idea of wanting to emulate what wealthier people and celebrities are doing, and as weddings become more extravagant, so do the rituals surrounding them.”
The first book on planning a bachelorette bash wasn’t published until 1998. That’s how new this tradition actually is. And yet it already has a template so calcified that deviating from it feels radical.
Then social media happened. And somewhere in that shift, the bachelorette stopped being designed around the bride and started being designed around the documentation of the bride. Content replaced the actual live experience, feelings were replaced by the grid. The Scottsdale-Nashville-Napa pipeline became the path of least resistance because it’s the most accessible and available to witness. Everyone knows what it looks like…you just have to show up and perform it.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with it.
What a bachelorette is actually for
Here’s something interesting: the oldest pre-wedding rituals for women weren’t about debauchery at all. Women in ancient Greece spent the day prior to marriage making offerings and sacrifices to Artemis, the goddess of chastity and childbirth. It was a marking, a ritual, a transition. A moment to honor the bride as she was before she became someone else.
To me, that’s still what a bachelorette is actually for, underneath all the glossy varnish and pink and purple.
The bride is marking a moment in her own life. Taking a snapshot of who she is as she moves from one version of herself to another. From solo self to partner-self. From the person she’s been building for years to the person she’s becoming. You’ve heard the saying that when you become a mother, you have to mourn or celebrate the maiden. The same is true of someone getting married. How do you want to mark this transition?
The people in the room or on the trip matter just as much as the place, if not more so. The bride’s closest friends and family, the ones who have known her as her, specifically, before anyone else, are there to hold up a mirror. To say: this is who you are right now. We see you, we celebrate you, and we’re not ready to let you go just yet.
And that’s what’s missing in most bachelorettes. Instead of being about who the bride really is, what’s worth celebrating, honoring, holding up about her specifically, it’s about what looks good on the grid. Inherited planning from templates and other people’s weekends that came before this one. That approach is bound to leave everyone feeling hollow, especially with a price tag attached.
The remedy
It’s not about spending more money. It’s about going deeper in a more meaningful way.
Human beings are innately unique. There is only ever one you! Making a bachelorette feel genuinely, specifically, unmistakably like the bride just takes the willingness to actually understand who she is, what she loves, what makes her feel alive and like herself. What she needs to feel before she walks down the aisle.
Sometimes those answers are obvious. Sometimes they take some heavy lifting. That’s where I come in. Here’s how I approach planning a bachelorette so it doesn’t just feel like a Pinterest board come to life, but a memory in the making that honors the bride, and everyone who loves her.
1. Ask the bride about herself. Really ask.
Not what color scheme she wants, at least not first, and not if it’s just because it’s the Pantone color of the year. What I really want to know is what she wants to feel on this trip. Who she wants to invite and why she wants them there. What she loves about herself in this moment, what she wants to remember about herself before she becomes a wife or partner, and how she wants to feel seen and celebrated.
Those answers will inform how we create a concept together, the story we’re telling about her. Everything else, the location, the activities, the food, the music, the ritual, flows from there.
If she wants to feel like a goddess who has been waiting her whole life to taste where olives come from, then maybe you go to a Greek island, spend time in a local kitchen. Host a beauty ritual with gold body oil and flower crowns made from goodies from the local market that morning. Indulge in a midnight swim and a fire where each woman writes something that she’s leaving behind.
If she wants to feel strong and feral and completely herself in her body before she says yes to forever, maybe that’s Montana and it’s big sweeping skies. Horse rides at dawn. A meal cooked over fire at a long table outside. A night under stars with no phones and no agenda. A letter she writes to herself to be opened on her first anniversary.
Same question. Two completely different women. Two completely different events.
2. Pick a place that represents who she is, not what looks good on social.
Location is a character, not a backdrop. It shouldn’t be the main character because she is. The right place does something specific to the people in it: your nervous system settles. Time stands still. You forget what’s coming up next and just enjoy where you are.
A small Greek island does something different than Mykonos. A working cattle ranch in Montana does something different than a rented Airbnb in Palm Springs. The right location is the one that does the right thing for her, not the one with the most recognizable skyline or the most obvious content potential.
Ask: where would she choose to go to feel most like herself? That’s almost always the answer.
3. Plan activities with her in mind and build in real downtime.
The best trips are not wall-to-wall activities. They have a rhythm. Mornings and afternoons with options, not mandatories that everyone has to participate in. When you make people participate in activities that consume the entire day and night, you end up with an exhausted group and the conditions for tension and fatigue.
Over-programming is the enemy of connection. The conversations that matter happen in the in-between, when someone’s making a morning coffee in the kitchen, while reading at the beach, on a long walk while everyone else naps at the inn.
Build one anchor experience that earns its place, the thing she will describe to people for years. Then protect the space around it.
4. Make sure the trip is worth the expense for everyone attending.
This is the conversation nobody wants to have and everybody needs to. 37% of bachelorette attendees spend over $1,000 on these event, and the average celebration lasts two days, with about one-fifth of attendees flying to the destination. That’s real money. Real vacation days. Real trade-offs.
The question isn’t the number, but whether the experience justifies it. A weekend that feels generic at any price point is expensive and not worth the cost. A weekend that feels made for the bride and her people, is something people will talk about for years. It’s worth an honest conversation about what it would actually take to do it right.
So, be transparent early. Design around what people can actually do and will make them feel like every dollar they’ve put towards this experience counts. Most people don’t have unlimited vacation days to give, so make the trip feel like a real treat that stands apart from every other bachelorette they’ve already attended.
5. Create meaning in the small moments.
This is what I mean when I say protect the space around the anchor: small moments are the ones custom-created for the bride and the people who love her, smaller in nature but designed with intention.
In a world driven by convenience and content, we are all hungry for ritual and connection. We’ve stripped most of it from modern life and this is an opportunity to give it back. It’s time we designed for that.
If this is resonating, forward it to someone planning a bachelorette who needs to read it. Or reply and tell me about the bride you're thinking of right now. That's always where the real design begins.
*Any spelling errors indicate a desire to keep on yur toes and to avoid using AI as a writing tool!
