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Advice for Brides Planning Dream Weddings: Don't.
Selena was in tears. She had been in tears from the moment her fiance got off the plane. The wedding was the next day and every single thing was going wrong.
David, 26 years old and in his third year of law school, had boarded the plane after his law school examination for the semester wearing the white dinner jacket she had made him acquire for the occasion and was met at the airport by Selena and her distraught mother. One of the six ushers who were supposed to have David’s back had called from Oregon to say that he’d missed his flight and didn’t think he’d be able to make it, so Selena’s youngest cousin was going to have to walk up the aisle on her own, unescorted. Selena and the maid of honor wanted to ask her politely to sit the wedding out because she’d paid $200 for her unwearable-ever-again-traditionally-hideous-dress and more than that for the matching shoes, so they felt that leaving her out might be a bit, you know, tactless. The florist had made a mistake about the flowers---Selena’s ‘colors’ were green and yellow and the bouquets had pink in them, and the bridal bouquet didn’t have the yellow roses in it she’d envisioned, more of a sort of cream. One of the bridesmaids wasn’t speaking to the maid of honor because of something one had said to the other. It was clearly gearing up to be a disaster instead of the happiest day of her life.
“What about my life?” David said miserably, when we were talking later. “Why isn’t it supposed to be the happiest day of my life? Why’s it just the bride who gets to have the whole day to herself and make everyone do everything she wants them to? I hate it. I thought it would be fun but instead of a big party it’s like some sort of Broadway production. It’s like she and her mom think if they don’t get every single nuance exactly right they’ll end up with bad reviews. And it’s costing her parents” (he named an improbable sum which I, being childless, refuse to believe, “for all this crap! Can you believe that? Can you believe people would spend that much money on a party for a wedding? It’s not like it’s that unusual---or special--- to get married. Practically everyone does it.”
The hysteria at the airport had completely unnerved him. He had stepped onto the plane, he confided, absolutely convinced that he had failed his Administrative Law examination because he’d been preoccupied on the critical preparation day with some crisis about the usher’s uniforms (David called them uniforms, and I thought it was sweet and also quite on point, so I will as well). He’d had to call up all his friends all over the country and tell them to go back and exchange something or other that had been ordered in taupe for something in dark blue. When he sat down to study, he couldn’t concentrate because he kept thinking about the cost of the wedding, the expectations of Selena and her parents, and the possibility that he would do or say the wrong thing and ruin it for everyone. It wasn’t completely illogical for him to worry---after all, if the wrong shade of flower in the bouquet could ruin everything, then what would happen if he forgot the ring, dropped the ring, stepped on her train, looked too visibly panicked, or---and this was his biggest fear---didn’t look exactly like the perfect Ken doll she’d been imagining.
“I’d do anything if I could get out of it,” he said. “Man, I thought I loved Selena---I was sure I did. I was scared when we finally made the decision, but I went along with what she wanted, bought her the ring she wanted and so on, and then I thought it would just be a matter of doing the same thing everyone else does---go to church, dress up, and then a big party afterward with all our friends. But it isn’t like that. I couldn’t ask a lot of people in my family because her parents want to have a big sit-down dinner afterward and there wasn’t room in the country club banquet hall. I asked if we could move it to a local hotel where there was plenty of room and just have finger food and cake like the weddings we’ve had in my family and they went ballistic---that would have been ‘tacky’ and the place was ‘ugly’ and it would look ‘cheap’, as if it doesn’t look tacky and ugly and cheap for us to leave out family members so we can have a sit down meal. And all the crap over her dress, and her shoes, and the flowers….Doesn’t she know I don’t care? Seriously, I can’t tell one white dress from another. I hate this. I hate it. But it’s too late to get out of it. Right?”
So why do young women carry on this way? How do they turn their weddings into self-referential pageants that are exclusively about them and why do their parents and society generally encourage them to think this is a good thing, a healthy thing, or an appropriate thing?
Selena wasn’t by any means the worst I’ve seen. She really handled things fairly reasonably right up until things started to go wrong on the day itself. Then she---like so many young women before her---completely forgot the purpose of the ceremony and got completely caught up in the stupid, pointless embellishments that somehow have been perpetrated on the public as part of the ceremony.
The bridesmaid having to walk unescorted up the aisle at the end of the ceremony, for example. Why was that even a problem? (A) So what, unless she herself objected; and (B) If she did, why not have the first usher to leave come back and walk her out? It’s not perfectly choreographed---so what? But what would have been wrong, what would have been inexcusable, what was inexcusable, was to so much as suggest to a cousin who had invested $300 in an ugly yellow and green organdie dress that she couldn’t return that she sit the wedding out. If the outcome had been blood on the grass, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. In the event, it was tears on the pillow---Susan, the cousin, was rightly offended at the clear implication that she was the lowest in status of the bridesmaids present and her aunt’s offer to reimburse her for her dress couldn’t assuage her wounded pride. In the end, they had her pour punch (wearing the bridesmaid dress), which necessitated knocking another relative out of the post of honor….
And it was all so stupid.
The flowers----did it really matter? Selena actually called up the florist and threatened to sue if her bridesmaids had to carry pink flowers up the aisle with their green and yellow dresses, so that a compromise was eventually effectuated (orange flowers).
And I admit that pink flowers would have clashed but again, so what? Did they have to carry flowers? If they had to carry something couldn’t it be something else?
I was silly planning my wedding many, many years ago, but not that silly. For one thing, my parents were old-fashioned and made it clear that the wedding wasn’t only about me and possibly not even primarily so. I had to beg to be allowed to have dark green ink for my Christmas wedding invitations instead of the traditional grey or black and my dad---‘we’re paying for this wedding, so we’re going to make the final decisions’---was never entirely happy about the green. I also had to beg for my choice of music. I hate the traditional wedding marches. I wanted to use the “Sanctus” and “In Nomine Patri” from Bernstein’s mass (pretentious, moi?) and I finally got my way, but only because my parents really liked them when they heard them. I wanted to carry red roses (No! No! No! Not done! Not done! Not done! Oh, all right.) My mother rejected out of hand my first choice of bridesmaid dresses in favor of a truly hideous (sorry Mom, I still think so) velvet long-sleeved wine-colored gown that was worse than it sounds and that suited no one. She also had final approval of my wedding dress and forced me to buy a Spanish style veil that I really hated. At the same time, while keeping me busy with these trivial details, she and my dad quietly planned and administered everything else. They handled all the details, for example, related to the comfort of their guests---which for them was (as it should be) paramount.
Weddings today cost five or six times as much, are three times more rigidly planned and orchestrated, and are ten times more likely to be designed to leave the bridegroom and his personal feelings completely out of the picture. David, for example, really was miserable throughout the whole rehearsal dinner. Selena, normally a kindly, sensitive young woman, was too busy stressing over the fight with the bridesmaid to pay attention to him, and everyone else was preoccupied with the champagne and the catering, but since I knew the inside story, I was conscious the whole evening of the worried, shadowed look in his eyes and the mechanical way he nodded and smiled all through the speeches.
I wish I could say that it all ended perfectly, with everything going like a dream, but it didn’t. Selena sat up half the night crying into her hands---not over David, to whose state of mind she was oblivious---but over the fight with her cousin. Her maid of honor stood staunchly by, hissing anathema and loudly censuring the ‘selfishness’ of Susan for ruining ‘Selena’s day’ by daring to show she was offended when she was, you know, insulted. Before the wedding, everything went fairly smoothly, and the ceremony itself went along all right (David looked calm, if not exactly radiant). Selena had that look on her way back up the aisle that you actually see on many bride’s faces if you look---relief and happiness, but also a definite shade of anticlimax. All that for this? Your big day and you plan and plan and pay and pay and in the end, nobody noticed that you were carrying orange flowers or that you were carrying flowers at all. Because nobody but the bride cares.
And then the wedding was absolutely ruined because of some sort of disaster with the photographer. I’m not certain of the details in the particular case, but this sort of thing seems to happen with frightening frequency, judging by what I’ve seen of court TV. According to David’s mom---Selena spent the first several days of her honeymoon feeling depressed and dispirited because after all they’d done there was nothing to show for it. (And I’ve seen and heard other women, older women than Selena behave the same way---as if the wedding was some sort of end in itself rather than a ceremony to celebrate a milestone. It’s awful and funny and sad because…if you married the one you love, how can anything ‘ruin’ the day on which it happened?
I thought about this again when David and Selena divorced. Their divorce was nothing to do with the wedding---they lasted seven years, pretty good I suppose for what David’s mother referred to sardonically as a ‘starter marriage’. On the other hand, all of that time, money, misery and for what?
It hit home with me because my ‘white wedding’ like so many others these days also ended in divorce. I have the book of photographs my parents bought me---100 photographs, $5 each, of ‘the best day of my life’ (and though it was pretty good, thank God it wasn’t the best because I was only 20) when I was surrounded by people I thought were going to be part of my life forever and who I haven’t seen or spoken to in more years than I care to count.
So why are people carrying on with this ridiculous tradition of excess and pageantry? Why do girls still convince themselves that the white dress is going to be more satisfying than, say, a substantial cash present, a down payment on a home, or simply the satisfaction of knowing that the parents will have sufficient money to live on when they retire? Why this conventional, standardized, really quite vulgar persistence in a ceremony which since my day has become increasingly objectified and choreographed?
It’s time to stop the craziness. You can have a wedding that’s fun and pretty without getting caught up in a lot of stupid conventions. The prettiest wedding I ever saw was on the shores of Clearwater Beach. I was sitting at a beach bar and they were having the wedding on the beach. All the guests were wearing khaki pants (this was a few years ago, in the heyday of the Gap) with a certain sort of untucked white shirt over them, except for the bridesmaids, who had long straight khaki skirts. The bride wore a completely plain white sheath. They had the ceremony right next to the water, at my favorite time of day, just before the sun starts to set. The sky was faintly pink, there were golden clouds overhead, everyone looked gorgeous against the backdrop of the Gulf of Mexico, and afterwards, they all walked back to a private room at the beach bar and had a hell of a party.
That's the sort of wedding your guests will remember and that you'll look back on fondly (instead of with incredulous shame/regret) when the starter marriage ends or when you're trying to scrape up the money for a downpayment on a home.
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