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Weddings, a pastor officiating at one I recently attended said, do much more than bring together two people. "They bring together a community, so we are all here not only to celebrate Anne and Roger's wedding, but also to celebrate our community." The icing on the wedding cake, the pastor went on to say, is like the mortar between bricks: it seals us all together. "This event is not only for Annie and Roger, but for all of us. I hope that by being here you can learn something about yourself, or your own marriage, or our community."
The metaphor was tortured, but the point, perhaps, instructive. One can only stand around with the groom's cousins from California chatting about wedding attire for so long. So I decided to take Pastor James up on his advice, and see what I could learn about myself and my community at Anne and Roger's wedding.
I decided that postmoderns should love weddings, because it appears that their meaning is tensile, and depends entirely on your point of view. A recently divorced buddy of mine felt wistful as he watched Anne and Roger toast one another with champagne. A wife looked pointedly at her husband of five years and muttered, "Someone should tell them that this fairy-tale stuff lasts about 10 minutes. They don't know the half of it when they say 'for better or for worse.'" But perhaps they had just had a bad fight, for another pair of Young Marrieds kept their hands clasped throughout the whole ceremony and proclaimed it renewing! Indeed, when Jennifer called three months later to tell me she was pregnant, she said, "Remember Anne and Roger's wedding? Well, we were just so inspired by young love that … here's a baby!"
One unwed twentysomething told me that the key to understanding wedding atmosphere is the previous marital status of the bride and groom: "At the weddings of college classmates," said Kim, "I just feel bad. Well-meaning aunts come up to you and ask when you're getting married. Second marriages are a whole different kettle of fish. All the divorcees crawl out of the woodwork and ask you to swear on a stack of Bibles that you won't get married till you're at least 32. Or 35. They tell you to find yourself first."
But there does seem to be a consensus—among Anne and Roger's guests, as well as in America writ large—that your wedding day is the most important day of your life. ("You dreamed about it. It's been carefully planned. So how will you invite someone to the most important day of your life?" asks an ad for Crane's stationery.) That weddings are important, of course, is not a new idea. Historians of American women have observed that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wedding was the one day when people were sure to pay attention to a woman. It was the one day when she, not her older brother, or her male cousin, or her beau or husband, was the star. So she, like the Crane's bride, planned and dreamed, and then, many women's diaries tell us, she felt the whole thing was somewhat anticlimactic.
Yes, weddings have always been important days—but compare next weekend's wedding announcements in your local newspaper with those from, say 1953, and you will notice what has changed. Today's weddings require more: more money, more planning, more courses, more elaborate floral arrangements. Indeed, in Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, authors Les and Leslie Parrott observe that most engaged people spend more time preparing for their weddings than they do preparing for their marriages.
That rings true. My friend Sheila quit her job three months after she got engaged to plan her wedding. "You'll see when you get married," she said. "It's a full-time activity. Of course, you could always find a wedding consultant, but I don't know how much time that saves. Unless it's someone you really trust, you'll want to oversee everything they do anyway." Hiring a wedding consultant, once the prerogative of the wealthy few, is now commonplace. Elizabeth Allen, an event planner in New York, explained to Elegant Bride magazine that she handles everything, from selecting a style of calligraphy for the invitation envelopes to figuring out which fish best complements the morel and portabello appetizer.
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