I Raced My Sister To The Altar

Juli and I got engaged to our boyfriends five days apart. But what should have been one of the happiest times of our lives quickly turned into a volatile rivalry that nearly tore us apart. When did wedded bliss become such a cutthroat competition?

When I told my older sister that my boyfriend of a year and a half had just proposed, her reaction was not what I had expected. Within the hour, she flooded social media with posts about her own engagement to her boyfriend of three years, which had happened days earlier. Then she sent me a text: “Have fun getting married in the basement!”

It was, she said, “a joke”— about how should have her wedding first and there’d be no funds left over for mine. After that things got so heated that we didn’t speak for months.

Unfortunately, this is a thing that happens (a lot) among sisters and also between close friends (remember Bride Wars?). When one person reaches a major moment in her love life—making a relationship official or moving in together or tying the knot— the claws come out, and the competition, as they say, is on.

Behind the Competition