Modern weddings seem designed to conceal reality of relationships

By David McElroy · February 26, 2022

I hate weddings, so I’m not sure why I agreed to go to one Saturday afternoon. But Kristen had invited me to go with her to several events in recent months and I’d declined them all. On a whim, I accepted this invitation, even though I wouldn’t know a soul there except my date.

The small country church was overflowing with a couple hundred people. I’d never been to this small rural community. I felt like an anthropologist trying to quietly disappear into the crowd of a tribe he was studying. But were they the aliens? Or was that me?

While we were on the way to the church, Kristen told me the couple’s story. The bride has never been married but has a 5-year-old daughter. The groom is the only son in a family that owns a couple of auto parts stores. The bride claims the pair had been dating “off and on” for awhile. The groom says it was just casual sex every now and then, but she got pregnant.

Angry parents were soon involved. The groom’s family insisted on an abortion. The bride’s family demanded a wedding. There were threats made all around. And now a semi-fancy wedding had been thrown together in just weeks.

I knew all of that going in — and Kristen told me everybody knew — but what I was about to see was a theatrical performance that defied all reality.

The pastor talked about how “God had brought these two together.” The bride sang an awful song — which I’d never heard — about how the pair had always been meant to be together. They lit a “unity candle” to symbolize how the two had “come together in Christ’s love.” And the bride’s daughter was the ring-bearer.

Everything about the ceremony — or performance might be a better word — would lead you to believe that these two were soulmates who had developed a deep and lasting love for one another. The bridesmaids squealed in stereotypical ways. The groomsmen looked bored. The parents of the couple looked proud.

After the two were pronounced man and wife, the bride’s veil came off and we could see that she was wearing a tiara. A man whose identity wasn’t clear to me announced that the bride had always been a princess — and now she would be the groom’s queen.

If you took the most stereotypical elements of a royal wedding and filtered them through the understanding and budget of middle-class people — but tried to turn it into satire — you would have ended up with something like what I saw.

I almost always end up feeling horrified at weddings, because they all seem like parodies to me. They seem to be stage plays based on a child’s fantasy of what life should be. To me, most weddings feel like grown-up children playing dress-up and pretending everybody means what is being said.

When I watch such things, I’m always waiting for the little boy from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to pipe up and tell the truth about what everybody already knows is true. But there’s always a conspiracy of silence instead. No matter what the real story is — whether the truth of a couple’s reality is good or bad — the staging plays out the same way.

It’s fantasy. It’s parody. Satire. But just underneath, it’s tragedy.

I was told that this wedding and reception cost about $30,000, which isn’t much by modern standards. The groom suggested that they simply elope and get the money as a down payment on a house, but everybody else was appalled at the suggestion. It seems that everyone seemed to believe that this elaborate farce was necessary to conceal the truth of what had really happened.

Much of what I see about modern marriages and weddings seems designed to conceal the truth. Regardless of the real story, everybody involved in such charades seems to believe he or she needs to go through the motions of pretense.

It’s as though every party involved has been fed a fantasy about what his or her role is supposed to be — in a wedding or in a marriage — and the real effort goes into falsifying reality for friends and neighbors and family. Even if everybody knows the truth, there’s a conspiracy of silence.

For reasons which will never be clear to me, people play their roles. They pretend to be what they’re not. It never seems to occur to most of them to stop pretending and live honest lives instead.

Everybody has his or her motives. Some have secrets they want to hide. Others are afraid of giving up money. More than a few are afraid of being alone or they’re afraid of what people might think.

In so many cases, though, people spend their lives continuing the sort of dishonest role-play that I watched in that little church today. I’ll never understand why they don’t drop the masks and go their own ways.

But I know from experience that most of them will continue this pretense right up until the day they die. And that’s depressing to me.

Note: I’ve changed the name of my friend and a couple of minor facts in this story to avoid pointing to the real people involved, but none of the material facts have been changed. The photo above is one I snapped with my iPhone about 10 years ago at a wedding.

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