Reality frequently doesn’t match fantasy when you know full story

By David McElroy · December 18, 2016

I hate wedding photos.

It’s not that I hate marriage or the people in the pictures. I just don’t see the glamour or fantasy or happiness that so many people associate with those photos. Instead, I associate them with shallow fantasy and excess spending by people looking — consciously or not — to paint a false picture for the world.

I’m often asked why I don’t make money on weekends by taking wedding photos, but I could never be a wedding photographer unless I could take the photos the clients want and tell myself I’m doing parody instead. My over-the-top satirical take on cliched “life event” photos would be exactly what many others truly want and find meaningful.

I’m really big on symbolism and finding meaning in metaphor. I find that wedding photos tend to be shallow expressions of fantasy to cover up the reality of relationships that are shallow and unhappy. Those photos let people lie to others about their marriages for years. More importantly, those photos let people lie to themselves.

My friend Keith Hall shared a story Sunday that neatly illustrates the unintended irony of the American obsession with the wedding facade, which I see as representative of the marriage facade.

In the Birmingham suburb of Leeds, there’s a wedding venue called the Sonnet House. It’s a nice old country home that’s used for weddings and other events. I’ve attended a couple of weddings there and it’s a fine venue for people who like that sort of show. I can honestly recommend it.

In one of the bathrooms of the house is a large red bathtub that has become popular for wedding photos. Keith posted an example of one of them with his story on Facebook and the venue has another example among the gallery of marketing photos on its site, above. But I wonder how many of those brides know the story of that bathtub. Here’s Keith to tell the story.

“I’ve been pretty interested here lately in all the brides who seem to be fascinated by the red bathtub at the Sonnet House in Leeds,” Keith wrote. “Before this house was a wedding venue it was the home of my great friend James Stanford. James is the one who was constantly building on it and transforming it from an old farmhouse to the Victorian look it has today.

“He purchased this bathtub by mail order in about 1993 and when it was delivered I helped him carry it into the house. On April 22, 1995, James had dinner at Capt. D’s in Leeds and went back home. He suffered a heart attack in this bathroom and fell dead into this tub where he laid until he was found the next day. I’m pretty sure he would be amused at the latest fascination with his tub!”

Keith obviously didn’t intend his story to be a commentary on American weddings and marriages, but I found the symbolism too fascinating to ignore.

The brides who have their pictures taken there want to present a fantasy to the world of what they are and what their relationships are. The underlying reality of that fantasy is that it was where a human being died.

Those who want to project the fantasy don’t want to look too deeply beneath the surface for what might lie underneath their symbols. The same is true for many of our marriages — maybe most of them.

A wedding is about fantasy. I see it as the ultimate self-satirizing event. I hate going to them because they feel fake to me. They feel like events at which even happy people are going through a rote script because it’s what is expected.

I wouldn’t be so bothered by this if I didn’t find so many marriages today empty and lifeless and loveless. Those marriages are the final resting places of the hopes and dreams of many well-meaning people who bought into a fantasy but had no interest in building the relationship to match the fantasy.

I believe in love and I believe in marriage, but I believe even more in honesty, emotional vulnerability and genuine partnership. The fantasy that men and women buy in our society most often leads to unhappiness.

Modern marriage is frequently just like that red bathtub — a place where people go to wait for their own death.

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Something small just made me happy. The specifics don’t matter, but I found myself smiling and I felt a kind of warm joy filling my heart and mind. In that brief moment of ecstasy, I felt the irrational desire to talk with a particular person. It wasn’t a calculated thought or a rational want. It wasn’t even that I wanted to tell the person about this particular thing. I simply felt ecstatic joy — and I somehow connected that feeling to this person. I can’t explain it. If we’re wise, we’ll pay attention to such moments, because the instincts of our hearts and minds often know more truth than our conscious and rational brains do. The same thing can be true in moments of great pain and suffering. If we pay attention to who our hearts are drawn to in such moments — of extreme joy or extreme hurt — we learn something about ourselves. I don’t know why. I only know that our gut instincts sometimes understand deep truths about ourselves that our rational brains haven’t yet figured out.

It started out as a satirical joke, but some friends liked the idea, so now it’s a real Facebook profile picture frame. If you’ve never heard of Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, let me explain. One of the dumber elements of social media is that it allows people to publicly signal their goodness and virtue to others — without actually doing anything of substance. So you see photo frames around profile photos saying things such as, “Moms Against Racism,” as though they’re standing up against those evil moms who are in favor of racism. It’s meaningless virtue-signaling and it deserves to be mocked, so I made a frame and published it on Facebook’s frame system today. If you go to your own Facebook profile picture and add a frame, then search for Moms Against Virtue-Signaling, you can select it. About a dozen of my friends are using it so far. It’s just fun satire — at least until Facebook decides it “goes against our community standards.” Or something. It’s just a fun way of mocking something that deserves to be mocked.

When I first told you about the project that would become DavidMcElroy.TV, I thought it would launch by mid-May. Since today is the last day of May — and I’m still not close to launching a finished product — here’s a brief update. The graphic above is the latest rough mockup of the format, but it’s still subject to change. Even the logo isn’t yet set in stone. Motion graphics are really difficult when you’re starting from scratch. Sunday night, my camera stopped recording, so it has to be sent off for repair. I have an older camera that I’ll keep using for testing, but I can’t launch without the better one. The audio system developed a low buzz this weekend that has me puzzled. I’ll be taking all the equipment over to the home of a local audio engineer who’s volunteered to help me figure out what I’ve done wrong. On top of all that, my on-camera performance seems to get worse with each test I do. There are days when I think I’m crazy to be attempting this. And in truth, I probably am insane to do it, but being crazy has never stopped me before. I’m at least a month away from launch and it could be a few months. Thanks for being patient — and thanks for all the support and enthusiasm for the project that you’ve sent my way.

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

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