This is not a Darryl Worley song.

I miss my friends.

This is not a new topic for my blog, so feel free to move on if you've heard it all before.

I'm feeling a little left out of the big deal of She's Getting Married. I have come to the realization that there are some things that I'll miss out on by going the solitary, online route, like trying on dresses with my friends.

I was watching the TLC show about a New York bridal salon, "Say Yes to the Dress" (we can go into the shame of that later), and maybe it was because I'd had a couple glasses of wine and it was, oh, 1 a.m. on a weeknight, but a particular scene got me a little blurry-eyed.

A bride pulls this (admittedly gorgeous, albeit stupidly overpriced) wedding dress over her head and stands on the little platform to see herself in the mirror, and suddenly the camera cuts to her mom, and then to her bridesmaids. The look on their faces said it all. "Wow. This is the dress." And everybody started laughing and smiling and hugging. Very touching.

I didn't get to have that!

And while, yes, I realize that in the long run, it's much better to have ordered my dress online, paying a pittance, a fraction of the cost of your run-of-the-mill David's Bridal thing than to blow a wad of cash on something I'll wear once so that I could experience that "moment," right now I don't care. I want that experience! I want someone besides me to get excited about this wedding.

Don't get me wrong. Kyle wants to get married. He wants a wedding. He's had opinions on things, like food and music and hiring a friend to DJ and whatnot. But it doesn't feel like anyone else is really into it.

But should they be?

Am I letting the artifice of the media version of weddings cloud my emotions? After all, it's me that's getting married, not my friends. Of course they're not being kept awake at night, thinking, "My God, what will Jen and Kyle do for a first dance?!" That would be silly.

Yes, I know why it has come to this. I have no bridal party. Showers and bridesmaid dress fittings are the stuff of which wedding buzz is made. How can they be interested in that which they are not involved? And Kyle and I made that choice ourselves; it's not as if people were begging me to not drag them into something that required random dress purchases.

If I had bridesmaids, by definition they'd have to be interested - people would be deciding who's throwing the shower, everyone would worry about their dresses (Will it suck? Will it be obscenely expensive? Will it make my butt look gargantuan?) and thus, they'd HAVE to talk to me, keep up with what's going on.

But I didn't want to burden anyone. My friends live in other towns and are very busy people (hell, most of them have children, do you know the time good parenting entails? I can only imagine). These people don't have time for standing around looking at each other in pastel-colored nightmares, deciding which one is boring enough to not make any particular person look horrible.

Not being a bridesmaid isn't the only reason why I don't see my friends as much as I'd like to, of course. We're all busy women, with jobs and/or kids and new homes or new relationships. And when you're on different tracks, it's hard to run into each other. Many of my friends have been married for several years, and now they're parents - that's a completely different social life than someone who's just starting a relationship, or someone like me, still trying to figure out just what my routine is, as a wife-to-be, new homeowner and employee. Some of us are going to Disney World, or are camping with our kids. Some of us are still going out on dates, or have the free time to fritter away on Christmas tree placement (against the wall? which one?). We're not exactly going to run into each other like that.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. There is nowhere to go.

I think, perhaps some of this is really about growing up. This is not the wedding of someone right out of college. I'm trying to plan a big-ass party of a lifetime, and I'm squeezing it in between buying new tires and finally getting around to registering for homestead exemption - and my friends are too. So I guess it comes down to this: I just can't have that TV show wedding experience; I don't live a TV show life.