Last week at breakfast my darling dear said to me, "Now don't think I'm suggesting anything but just hypothetically what do you think your parents would say if you told them we were engaged?" I choked on my Russet potato and then, swigging some ice water, remembered that we are both firmly committed to non-commitment and took the question as posited. "I think they would say, 'Ha ha, good one Kate." His face did not fall. He was not testing. My faith in him was restored.
Panic attack over, I started thinking about why it freaks me out so much. I don't hate the idea of being married someday, I just don't think I'd be very good at it. What I really hate is the specter of having a wedding. I'd pretty much rather harvest my internal organs with a plastic spork than have 200 people sending me gifts and speculating about the state of my future union and wondering if I'll cry up in front of the church. That sounds like the worst day of my life, not the best.
Recently Frou* told me about a family friend with seven children. One of their daughters has been dating a nice young man for NINE years and is now planning on nuptials. The darling girl is hellbent on an amazing, all-out wedding whose price tag is looking to be in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. Yes, you read that correctly. The parents are obliging, but they asked if she would rather have a low-key wedding and take the balance for a down payment on a house. "No," she said. "We want the wedding." Someone that zeroed in on her wedding will probably turn into such a basket case that she won't even enjoy the damn thing. Most of the guests probably won't either. That's because most weddings suck.
My hatred of weddings is deeply rooted, having only been to one for an actual friend (which was actually nice, I'll admit, an aberration in my string of dreaded weddings), and then it was only a reception. The first wedding I remember going to was my aunt's when I was eight. I'd demanded to be a flower girl and was obliged. The only thing of note that happened was that I got dirt on my white shoes and cried and cried until my dad said, "This shoe is so clean I would drink champagne from it," and then he did.
Then there was an uncle's wedding. All I remember is being really bored and taking an instant dislike to the Chicken Dance. Ugh, the Chicken Dance. Are you, like, kidding?
My cousin's wedding was pretty but it was 96 degrees out and I was a bridesmaid and wearing high heels (which I never do) and sweating at the front of the church and I swear to Zeuss I almost fainted several times. I focused on a front-row face to keep my bearings but I can't remember a thing about the ceremony because I was too involved with remaining conscious.
At a second cousin's wedding things might have been okay except that my dad decided to ban me from the open bar even though I was twenty and a half and the day before he and I had split a bottle of wine. It was a Montana wedding. Nobody would have cared. So the Brothers Trent and I watched as the under-agers got piss drunk and had a great time and danced the damn Chicken Dance with gusto.
There have been others. Weddings that your parents are invited to and they drag you along because the bride babysat you once when you were four. This is the worst kind of wedding because you have to hug the bride in the greeting line and say, "I'm so happy for you. Do you recognize me? Okay good." Then you sit at the reception talking to people in wheelchairs about arthritis and how good the lutefisk is. Wedding cake is usually kind of nasty. If you are a young female everyone will make you stand in the crowd to catch the bouquet and if you catch it and you don't know the bride well you feel guilty.
At worst you will pay $250 for a dress that looks like a Disney costume and talk to your anorexic third-cousin about her new shoes for forty minutes. At best you will have friends at the wedding and you can get drunk and make sex jokes about the bride and groom. That sounds like a rockin' time to me but how often are we invited to weddings we actually want to go to? Maybe a one-in-three lifetime average.
I pledge here and now that if I ever break my solemn vow to never get married I will go to the Justice of the Peace and then have an open bar (and by bar I mean cooler and liquor cabinet) and a few barbecues in someone's backyard and I will pay Kevin's friends in beer to make food and everyone will wear whatever the hell they want and I will use the fancy schmancy money to pay for peoples' taxis home. Red plastic cups for everyone! Then I will go on a kick-ass honeymoon. That sounds like a day to remember.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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*Name has been changed in case it would irritate her.
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