No. In this case, booze would have helped.
It cetainly has!
I like weddings. Two people who love each other, two families coming together to create a new family, a chance to dress up, the opportunity to see old friends, good food, dancing…I love it all.
Maybe I’m exceptionally lucky, but I’ve never been to a wedding where the bride or groom behave poorly or where I’ve not been genuinely happy for the couple. And I’ve been to weddings that range from full-on Goth to barefoot hippie in the park to Southern Baptist with lime sherbet punch in the fellowship hall.
Two things I dislike intensely are (a) being around drunk people and (b) dancing. Having people I love get drunk and demand that I dance…that’s a real slice o’ heaven.
I loved the analogy about writing your own vows.
And weddings are proof that dressing up in fancy clothes does not thereby confer taste and style upon anyone.
Other than that…weddings are great.
Viridiana, if you invite people who love you, I guarantee that most of them will be happy to come to your wedding. Don’t invite your co-workers or your parents’ friends, just the people who care about you and your affianced. Some of them might not like most weddings, but I’d be very surprised if most of them didn’t want to affirm *your * new family and new life.
Thanks burundi, that’s uplifting (and from Jayn too, good advice) 
Talk to me in November - it’s ‘that season’ in my life, with no less than 4 weddings in the next 4 months, as well as my own possibly in January or February. I’ve been to 4 others - 1 was great, 1 was terrible, and the rest were social affairs I felt I needed to attend. My brother’s was the interesting one, as we did it at the family cabin as they had no money. So I guess I can’t say I ‘hate’ weddings as it all depends on the normal things for any gathering of people - who’s there, what are they like, what are the entertainments like, and what are the bride and groom like.
Mine I’m hoping will be fun - it’s either going to be at a Stately Home in Kent, or else at Timberline Lodge at Mt Hood in Oregon (depending on my work visa situation in either January or February) and the whole, and entire, object is to have a nice wedding where the guests have fun, as well as get together her family and mine for the first real time (neither of us are remotely religious). Our families are from opposite sides of the Atlantic so the getting together bit is pretty important. We’d rather do it here, because most of her friends and a few of my UK friends will find it difficult cost-wise to travel to the US, whilst most of my US friends and family can easily afford to come here, even though it’s far more expensive here than there.
Wait a minute – you’ve been a bride twice and you still hate all weddings? You didn’t even enjoy your own? Why didn’t you plan it better then? Why didn’t *you * have a Star Wars wedding?
Good lord man. Certainly some weddings are like this, but you don’t see anything pleasurable about two people in love celebrating their joy together? And vowing in front of the community to spend their lives with each other? It doesn’t do anything for you?
I think I’d rather spend some time in one of Bush’s torture camps than go to a wedding.
Getting dressed up in hot Dallas weather on a weekend? Hate it.
Watching obese suburban mousewives do the Macarena? Hate it.
Watching some shotgun marriage so the bride can start pushing out kids? Hate it.
Listening to grandpa rant about how Barack Obama will install Osama bin Laden as dictator for life? Hate it
I’ve gotten very good at weasling out of weddings.
I knew a couple where everybody wanted to go to her wedding, but nobody wanted to go to his
About writing your own vows…if you were hearing the standard “have and to hold, sickness and in health…” for the first time, you’d be blown away with its beauty and poetry. Unfortunately, you’ve heard it a million times.
But everybody thinks they can write something better. They’re wrong.
Absolutely nothing. I’ve never understood why anybody finds those kind of treacly public declarations entertaining. To me that’s just intensely uncomfortable and gross. It’s a modified version of making out in front of everybody. They need to get a room.
I’m not a cold fish with my own wife and kids. We’re a very huggy, affectionate family. I make sure I tell my wife I love her at least once a day (and it’s usually more like 20 times), I just think that should be a private thing, not a public thing.
Also, half of those marriages are going to break up anyway, and it seems to me liek the bigger the talkers they are about their unbreakable love, the shorter the marriage lasts. I’m cynical, I know, but I’ve noticed that the most long-lasting, truly loving couples don’t go around giving speeches about it.
I like weddings and receptions. The ones I’ve been too are people I know fairly well, and know they aren’t Bridezillas and Groomonsters.
I’ve made cakes for receptions too, the latest was my gift to the happy couple. That was an easy wedding. Both had been married before(he was a widower, she divorced) and instead of their own service they simply stood up during a regular Sunday morning service, right after the sermon, and the priest ran through the vows. Then there was cake and punch after church was over.
Star Wars hadn’t been invented yet. 
The first time I was 19, pregnant, broke, and scared. The second wedding was better. We were married by a JP in the courthouse with a few close friends, then brunch at a truck stop, and a big party at a local bar that night.
Most of the weddings I’ve attended have been very strained – pregnant brides, husbands the family didn’t approve of, second and third marriages that the kids didn’t approve of, and one wedding where something went wrong and the bride freaked out (there was a lawsuit later).
I haven’t been to many “Isn’t love wonderful!” weddings. I’ve been to too many “We have to do this” weddings.
Oh, it can indeed get worse. The last wedding I was at was generally good. The bride didn’t take herself too seriously, the location was great, the fed everyone who showed up lots of great food (three or four meals), there were open bars at every turn, and they thought about the comfort of guests more than their own agrandizement.
Then we had the ceremony. Not only did they write their own vows, they wrote poetry, Vogon poetry, and had people in the audience stand up and read it out loud at various points in the service.
Oh, but Punk, you say, you’re being too hard on them. They’re in love, you say. Vogon is such a harsh term, you say. Cut them some slack!
Vogon, I say, bitterly. I said Vogon and I meant Vogon! It was all about how badly they had been screwed over by the previous SOs in their lives, and how, no matter how boring, tedious, irritating or annoying the current spouse was, things could never again be as bad as they had been in those previous relationships. With detailed examples, both of bad relationships, and current less-than-perfectness.
Vogon!
I’m going to my sister’s wedding next month. It’s her third. She’s no Bridezilla by any means, but she is acting a little perturbed that not even her closest friends are demonstrating the sort of breathless excitement that they did the first time round.
Generalizing recklessly, amateur poetry is the only thing I know of that fails to follow Sturgeon’s Law. 90% of it isn’t crap; all of it is crap.
Too many people think that if you can make a rhyme, you’ve automatically got poetry.
Come now! That is entertainment gold, my friend. You could have gotten ho-hum, standard issue Khalil Gibran or “Apache Wedding Poem” readings, but instead you got this deliciously bad, wildly inappropriate gift of wretched poetry. You can amuse folks for years with that story. Were you able to keep a straight face during the ceremony?
Just out of curiosity, have any of the people in this thread who say that they genuinely enjoy weddings (and not just because they like to get drunk) been persons of the male gender?
Damn you people and your gender-neutral nicknames! looks up at own name Um, except me, I mean. I’m cool.