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Wedding Bell Blues
I don't know why, but I have been thinking about marriage recently. Not at a personal level, mind you, more at the level of the meaning and ceremony of marriage, and especially of Weddings. Like so much of what we lose through inevitable progress, I think we are losing something very important and meaningful about weddings, and we don't even realize it.
This is an odd thing for me to have bouncing around in my skull, as I have never considered myself a big wedding fan. First, I am a guy. Second, I tend to be of a practical cast of mind, and have mostly convinced myself that what follows the ceremony is much more important than blowing three grand on hors d'oevres. My wife and I went the practical route ourselves, getting hitched by a judge in the Waukegan County Courthouse with minimal fanfare.
In order to define what it is that is changing, let us start by examining what a wedding represented, say, a hundred years ago. The bride and groom were mostly likely fairly young, although the groom, as today, tended to be slightly older. Marriage in the teens and early twenties was the norm. The participants were likely to be virgins or very sexually inexperienced. As they were just starting out in adult life they were most likely not very well off materially. The idea that the marriage could end in a divorce was a horrific idea that most dared not contemplate. In essence you would have two young people in their physical prime, poised at the edge of adulthood, young enough for their innocence to be largely intact, yet old enough to understand the promise, and challenge, of a lifeling union.
The wedding ceremony in this context was a rite of passage like no other, a sparkling bud in which were tenderly wrapped the hopes and energies of a lifetime: of love, sex, children, family, career, adulthood, life. The wedding was the one brief shining joyful moment when everything was good and everything was possible. Childhood lay behind, cast off like old clothes, adult life lay ahead hazy yet brilliant, and on the cusp stood two radiant souls ready to be propelled into life armed with the love and assistance of their families. It is no wonder people cried at weddings.
Flash forward to 1999. Another wedding is to occur. This time the bride and groom are in their early '30s, and both have successful careers well underway and a whole bunch of money in the bank. They have been shacking up for two years and although they have made the decision to marry, they don't expect to have children for a few years more. They have both had several sexual partners, and although they do not anticipate divorce, the prospect does not horrify them. The old fashioned need for dad to pick up the cost of the wedding seems trivial when daughter has more money in the bank than Pop.
The wedding, although exquisitely planned, just doesn't have the luster. The bride preposterously wears white, and nobody cares. The gifts are many and expensive, but mean little to the prosperous couple beyond the birthday-thrill of unwrapping. The couple are no longer on the cusp. Childhood is long gone, and the future has been here for several years. The most significant change in their life will be starting a joint checking account. The bud that held their hopes and dreams has prematurely bloomed, rendering their future a set of overlapping shadows and their marriage a mere loving partnership.
In reality, the modern marriage may turn out to be happier and more stable than the old fashioned one. But the moment that was a wedding has been much diminished. That searing, nerve wracking, breath-catching once in a lifetime jewel that could both stoke a young girl's fantasy and engage an old man's fondest memory is now little more than a heluva party and a good time for all.
I obviously exaggerate somewhat for rhetorical effect. But there is a difference, as the cult of perpetual adolescence has tempted us to put off the meaningful parts of adulthood later and later. I believe it is ironic that marrying later means we are able to postpone growing up, but that is what I think is happening. Marriage appears to be yet another of the things that we rather blithely went about altering as a consequence of larger changes. It may well be another thing that made more sense the way it was.