I went to a wedding this evening. It was nice. The bride was pretty, the groom handsome and everyone looked happy. I hope for all the best for them as they are both really nice people.
The thing is I don’t seem to be able to be happy for them. I can’t seem to be able to see the joy that I have always believed you are supposed to feel on your wedding day. As I sit here and realize this, I think what a thoughtless person I must be to not be able to be happy for someone who chooses to get married. I know I am not thoughtless in everyday life… but why can I not see the joy in being married?
Is it all the wedding propaganda? Is it too much t.v. showing us love the way people think it should be?Is all that for real? Is there something wrong with me?
This has not all of a sudden hit me. It is the way I have always been. When I was a little girl, I never dreamed of getting married, hell, I never even thought about it!
Now I find myself married and very unsatisified with the entire situation, not that I do not love my hunny!! I do love him, but I really hate being married.
I hate going to weddings. It’s probably why Mr. Granola and I have been living common law (or rather, in sin) for so long now. I can’t even stand to be at my own wedding.
I offer no explanation for this. I just don’t like them. If we do get married, we’re eloping.
The problem is that people tend to act so fake at weddings. You can tell that they’re trying too hard to be happy for the couple.
Another part of the problem is that the marriage ceremony has become less about the sacred bonding of two people and more about putting on a great show.
I don’t mind weddings, but there is one part I can definitely do without:
shrill female emcee voice
“Will all the single ladies please come to the dance floor? The bride will be tossing her bouquet!”
Oh, goody.
After I turned 14 or so, at every wedding I attended, I invariably got a look of, “Oh, that’s you” whenever this part of the wedding rolled around. To this day, I find it annoying and demeaning. Look at the single women clamoring for the bouquet! Whomever catches it will get married next! You don’t want to be an old maid, do you?
Creepy, I was just examining my own feelings on this. ESP, Ang?
I do have a coworker getting married in February, and I expect to feel thrilled for her.
But this past weekend we were up on Mackinac Island, and I saw half a dozen weddings or wedding parties. And oddly enough, I didn’t think “Awwwwwww… how wonderful! [fish for tissue in handbag]” Instead, it was more like “I wonder if their wedding day was what they expected. I wonder if they like that dress they chose. I’ll bet the bridesmaids are irritated about spending $200 for a dress that they’ll never wear again. The weather sure wasn’t nice today. What’s the divorce rate these days? Why do we observe so many rituals for weddings when we have preserved so few other traditions? How many fights did the bride have with the groom or her mom, over wedding stuff” etc etc etc. My feelings ranged from apathy to cantakerousness.
Maybe Jeep’s Phoenix put it best. It’s more about the show. I feel like people just do the same old crap they’ve seen done at every other wedding. There is meaning behind many of those traditions, but I doubt they really know about that aspect. If you’re going to follow tradition, wonderful, do it for a real reason. And if you don’t know about the reasons, then don’t be automatons. Make a day that is about something, something that reflects you and your beliefs (or the way you like to celebrate big events).
Believe me, I know all about the getting caught up in the hype of planning my “perfect day”. It’s all fun and games…until you say “I will”!!
It’s like Christmas… you rush and plan and prepare to make sure everything is just right, from the gifts to decorations to the turkey… then it comes and WOW… but then it goes and all you are left with is some new stuff and post celebration let down.
Talk about a reality check!
Maybe I haven’t been to enough weddings. I just went to my friend’s a couple weeks ago, and it was super. This was the first wedding of a friend of MINE that I was able to attend (my parents’ friends don’t count). Sure, it’s about the show, but that’s to make the families happy. I know that Jos and her husband (sounds so weird!) Jason would have been happy to have a super-simple wedding in a city hall, but their parents had other plans. Their wedding was absolutely gorgeous, everything went perfectly, and a good time was had by all. (There was a klezmer band, and I LOVE dancing to klezmer music!!!)
And this is coming from someone who has no desire to get married whatsoever. I haven’t a romantic bone in my body, it was just great to see my friend so happy. I know that this is what she wanted.
so my sister just got engaged and i had a bad dream about weddings last night.
i dreamed that my parents had arranged the whole thing and that i did not have any say in how the wedding went.
all they kept saying was ‘you should be grateful’.all i did was cry and give my mom a hard time.i cried about the dress, the invites, the reception.
FWIW i am not getting married anytime soon
I’ve DJed weddings for over ten years (sympathy, please), so you can, without too much joking, call me a wedding expert.
Yep, 90% of them are all the same. The same show, the same food, the same speeches and jokes, the same music (ugh!), the same fashions…
Anytime a couple came into the office, wanting something “different”, I’d jump on that gig like a fat kid on a Smartie… but even a good 60% of THOSE turned out to be the same thing.
I hate going to weddings. Even the most expensive, well-planned ones I’ve attended were boring and trite. The only one I enjoyed was my own, which cost $100 and was attended by myself, my husband, and the minister. Took 20 minutes. It was perfect and if I could go back with an unlimited budget, I would do it exactly the same way, then throw a big bash a week later for friends.
Maybe changing just a couple things to liven it up would be in order. For instance, bridesmaids in black veils weeping and wailing up the aisle. Groomsmen serving drinks to the waiting guests (weddings always seem to start an hour late). Give everyone squirt guns filled with grape kool-aid instead of little bags of rice for after the ceremony. Draw numbers for doorprizes. Hand out poison dart guns to be used on the DJ as soon as he starts up the Chicken Dance or the Macarena.
My GF and I are both very disdainful of the standard wedding. If and when we ever decide to tie the knot, we’re planning to rent out a guest house in New Orleans and get our close family and friends to join us down there for a few days. At some point we’ll find a minister and have a quick ceremony, after which we’ll all adjourn to the Gumbo Shop and perhaps the Funky Butt.
I was discussing this with some friends of mine who recently got married in the traditional fashion. The brides among them told us that if we got married like that instead of the big church wedding, Tamara would regret it later on. Our response: Huh? Would we regret that any more than we would regret spending a minimum of $15,000 to make sure that our “special day” was just exactly like everyone else’s?
My favorite wedding story–one of the aforementioned brides, Arianna, decided that they had to have match boxes at the reception, complete with “Joey and Arianna”, the date, and some doves or some shit like that. However, there was no smoking at the reception, and Arianna was afraid that kids might get hold of the matches and set something on fire. So they did the obvious thing–they found some small, Skittle-like candy to fill the boxes instead of matches.
It gets better. Joey was at Arianna’s house one night while she was away, and he and her roommates decided to go ahead and fill the boxes. They were almost done when Ariana returned. When she saw the boxes, she reluctantly expressed her gratitude, and then proceeded to have “that look” for the rest of the night. When pressed, she finally admitted what was bothering her–some of the boxes, she said, seemed to have too much red candy, or too much green, or yellow. They just weren’t balanced. Joey, being the patient soul that he is, dumped the candy out of the 150 boxes or so that he had already filled, separated it into colors, and re-filled them with an appropriately balanced mix.
Funny thing is, I didn’t even see the matchboxes at the wedding.
