But was the point of the story that it was a good marriage, despite the bad start and lack of consummation? Or was it just a bad marriage that lasted for 30 years?
Thanks for the link.
Bear, do you still have the pictures? All the links in that thread are as dead as roadkill on the hood of a car resting on cinder blocks in an overgrown backyard.
and miss out on calling her “Idiaunt”?
Sorry, I don’t get it.
He was doing it wrong.
You don’t release the doves until [list=A][li]The guests have had a few drinks, and [*]After they got their shotguns out of the truck[/list][/li]Regards,
Shodan
I wonder if there’s an inverse correlation between the price of the wedding and the length of the marriage. It certainly holds true in my experience.
Between the license and the Notary, it cost us $35 to get married. It’s been 33 years so far - barely over a buck a year! 
Probably not in absolute terms, but I bet you’d find correlation as the cost of the wedding rises in proportion to participant economic factors - e.g, the closer it comes to the couple’s annual salary, the more of a disaster it’s likely to be. Multiples of newlywed income, more so. As with any other curve, it probably falls apart at the very low and high ends.
I don’t understand why a couple splitting up wants the wedding album in the first place.
Well, if your whole life was just leading up to this awesome wedding that you had planned for yourself, you might want to hang onto the pictures.
Just a jumping-off point, but -
My first long-time partner had a friend whose entire life was about her wedding. As she was about 26, snotty, judgmental and unattractive (thick glasses in an ugly style, 1950s hairdo, and the kind of +30 pounds that looks awful) - not to mention unattached and may never have been attached - it was just a trifle pathetic. The times we’d socialize, she never stopped talking about her hope chest and what was being made for it and how many sets of linens she had and all of this other positively Victoria blather. Yet she seemed actively terrified of men - was hostile to me unless I just let her orbit my “wife” without interference and stayed out of the conversations, visibly reacted if a guy walked within ten feet of her, talked to clerks and doormen by looking at her feet, etc.
She was more normal than that might sound; I don’t think she had any social condition or touch of mental illness. But her entire waking, breathing life was about Her Wedding, and nothing else. Not even a husband or married life or kids or even a divorce… just The Wedding.
When my 18-year old nephew and his 16-year old girlfriend (“But we’re in loooooooove!”) got married, even the parents were placing bets.
At the reception, the best man (the groom’s older brother) started his toast with, “Well, they did it. Just like they said they would.”
Less than a year.
One of my cousins delayed her second wedding for over 2hrs. The whole delay time, her 2 sisters were trying to tell her to “just do it and get it over with; it’s just nerves, it’ll all work out fine.” She eventually appeared, walked down the aisle (making several snide comments about her husband-to-be as she stopped to talk to people along the aisle), and “got it over with”.
Over within two years.
An uncle was marrying a woman whose parents were somewhat well-off. All our previous interactions with her for the previous year or so were pleasant, and she seemed very nice. She was the host of a local nighttime talk radio show that dealt with relationships, and “The Wedding” had been a frequent topic of discussion on the show. The reception was at a *very *nice reception facility - nice to the tune of $80,000+ (another uncle happened to overhear the bride’s father discussing the reception’s cost with another guest). All seemed to be going well until the cutting of the cake - when my uncle went to do the traditional cake-to-the-face on her, she snarled something to him with a finger in his face, that silenced the guests close by them. It was a brief moment, but it looked very ugly… and it turned out to be the first sign of things to come.
Over within three years.
Sometimes they want them for the kids.
My parents don’t have a wedding album because the photographer accidentally ruined the film while developing it. (Several people said they should have sued; all they wanted was their money back, which they did get.) When my sister was a teenager, she asked why she had never seen their wedding album, and I thought really fast and told her that they were never really married - that they had just been living together all these years and we were illegitimate. 
:o I then said, “No, that’s not true. They’re married!” and then explained what had happened.
I later told our mother about this, and she said that my sister was wanting them to get divorced because she was being teased at school for having married parents. :eek: :mad: This was in the late 1980s, BTW.
If my husband had tried the cake to the face with me, it would have been over in five minutes.
You are talking about smashing the cake in her face, right? I’ve never seen that happen in a marriage that’s lasted. Different traditions for different people, I guess, but my family would have been horrified.
DH and I solidly agreed that that was totally unappealing and inappropriate. We did the more dignified “feed each other a bit” thing.
Us, too, except I ended with dabbing a bit of cake on his nose. The smashing thing I’ll never understand.
Any time they rush into it because one person’s green card is about to expire is usually a bad sign (my lesbian cousin who married her best friend’s boyfriend back in the 90s expressly to keep him from being deported excepted). I have never known a marriage like that to work out. I don’t mean a marriage where one person simply happens not to be an American, I mean specifically where a dating couple rushes into something because of a green card or deportation issue.
Also, in my personal experience, Jew/non-Jew marriages don’t work out when the non-Jew actively practices something else. Deaf/hearing marriages tend not to work out, with the rare exception of a couple of which the hearing person knew sign language very well before the relationship began, and already interacted in the Deaf Community and had many Deaf friends. I know a couple of marriages like that (one where the hearing person had Deaf parents and siblings and worked as an interpreter), and they are going strong, but any marriage where the hearing person learned sign language just to communicate with the partner, and knows no other Deaf people, is usually going to fail.
I’ve known several people in green card marriages. No, they very last longer than it kes or the checks and paperwork to clear, but I wouldnt say they didn’t work out or were bad. They worked out exactly as both parties imagined (more or less) going into it.
I’ve never understood this custom. What is the point? Apart from a waste of a cake, it’s an act of aggression and contempt, and if you’re going to do that, what’s to stop you doing the full Neanderthal with the club and dragging her off by her hair instead of carrying her across the threshold.