Wedding Nights—and Daze

Weddings, a pastor officiating at one I recently attended said, do much more than bring together two people. “They bring together a community, so we are all here not only to celebrate Anne and Roger’s wedding, but also to celebrate our community.” The icing on the wedding cake, the pastor went on to say, is like the mortar between bricks: it seals us all together. “This event is not only for Annie and Roger, but for all of us. I hope that by being here you can learn something about yourself, or your own marriage, or our community.”

The metaphor was tortured, but the point, perhaps, instructive. One can only stand around with the groom’s cousins from California chatting about wedding attire for so long. So I decided to take Pastor James up on his advice, and see what I could learn about myself and my community at Anne and Roger’s wedding.

I decided that postmoderns should love weddings, because it appears that their meaning is tensile, and depends entirely on your point of view. A recently divorced buddy of mine felt wistful as he watched Anne and Roger toast one another with champagne. A wife looked pointedly at her husband of five years and muttered, “Someone should tell them that this fairy-tale stuff lasts about 10 minutes. They don’t know the half of it when they say ‘for better or for worse.'” But perhaps they had just had a bad fight, for another pair of Young Marrieds kept their hands clasped throughout the whole ceremony and proclaimed it renewing! Indeed, when Jennifer called three months later to tell me she was pregnant, she said, “Remember Anne and Roger’s wedding? Well, we were just so inspired by young love that … here’s a baby!”

One unwed twentysomething told me that the key to understanding wedding atmosphere is the previous marital status of the bride and groom: “At the weddings of college classmates,” said Kim, “I just feel bad. Well-meaning aunts come up to you and ask when you’re getting married. Second marriages are a whole different kettle of fish. All the divorcees crawl out of the woodwork and ask you to swear on a stack of Bibles that you won’t get married till you’re at least 32. Or 35. They tell you to find yourself first.”

But there does seem to be a consensus—among Anne and Roger’s guests, as well as in America writ large—that your wedding day is the most important day of your life. (“You dreamed about it. It’s been carefully planned. So how will you invite someone to the most important day of your life?” asks an ad for Crane’s stationery.) That weddings are important, of course, is not a new idea. Historians of American women have observed that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wedding was the one day when people were sure to pay attention to a woman. It was the one day when she, not her older brother, or her male cousin, or her beau or husband, was the star. So she, like the Crane’s bride, planned and dreamed, and then, many women’s diaries tell us, she felt the whole thing was somewhat anticlimactic.

Yes, weddings have always been important days—but compare next weekend’s wedding announcements in your local newspaper with those from, say 1953, and you will notice what has changed. Today’s weddings require more: more money, more planning, more courses, more elaborate floral arrangements. Indeed, in Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, authors Les and Leslie Parrott observe that most engaged people spend more time preparing for their weddings than they do preparing for their marriages.

That rings true. My friend Sheila quit her job three months after she got engaged to plan her wedding. “You’ll see when you get married,” she said. “It’s a full-time activity. Of course, you could always find a wedding consultant, but I don’t know how much time that saves. Unless it’s someone you really trust, you’ll want to oversee everything they do anyway.” Hiring a wedding consultant, once the prerogative of the wealthy few, is now commonplace. Elizabeth Allen, an event planner in New York, explained to Elegant Bride magazine that she handles everything, from selecting a style of calligraphy for the invitation envelopes to figuring out which fish best complements the morel and portabello appetizer.

And should you feel the need to disseminate all your wedding details well in advance, you don’t have to rely on the U.S. Postal Service. You can turn to any one of a zillion web sites, such as theknot.com or Weddingchannel.com, which tells us, “Love is wild, spontaneous and impulsive. Weddings are planned.” Deposit all your information there, and your eager friends can tune in to the latest updates: where’s the reception, where have you registered, how formal is the attire?

The Parrots are right: all this planning doesn’t mean that couples are also carving out time to plan their marriage. The details of the reception seem to be more important. At my friends’ recent wedding in Charles ton, the bride burst into tears—not, admittedly, an unusual sight; as Jim Waltzer put it in a recent article in Brides magazine, weddings manage to turn “the steely-eyed into the teary-eyed.” But Julie wasn’t crying at the altar overcome with emotion; she teared up during the reception, when she walked by the cake. It was a Martha Stewart-inspired seven-tier, vanilla cake drenched in golden icing, toasted coconut, and piping dots (check out the September 1999 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings for the recipes Julie drew from). Guests walking by oohed and ahhed and waited for the moment when Julie and Michael would feed slivers of the seven-tier wonder to one another. But little Sven, a four-year-old cousin, had beaten them to it: he had swiped a fistful of icing from the cake, leaving four small fingerprints where a row of brown-sugar meringue buttercream dots had once been. That is why Julie cried. Three weeks later, the cake was all she could talk about. Dinner conversation at the newlyweds’ home did not revolve around the ontological change inherent in the sacrament of marriage or the difficult process of marrying together two overlapping book and CD collections, it did not turn on the honeymoon or how supportive Julie’s bridesmaids had been. All Julie could talk about was how sad she was that the cake had been ruined before the photographer had gotten around to snapping its image.

Wedding budgets also underscore how important brides and their families think weddings are. Three of the brides to whose weddings I devoted weekends last spring and summer smiled bravely about the debt they were incurring: “It’s a good thing I don’t have college loans,” declared one, who borrowed $34,000 to add to the $20,000 her parents put up for her fete. In 1994, I attended Karen and Steve’s wedding—the first I’d attended where the bride and groom were not relatives or friends of the family, but people with whom I had stayed up late in tiny dorm rooms drinking cheap beer and having the archetypal collegiate conversations about The Genealogy of Morals. About 200 of Karen and Steve’s nearest and dearest gathered on Long Island to celebrate their nuptials, at a ceremony on which they had spent more than $100,000. The dress alone, white silk gilded with lilies cut from lace, cost over $4,500—more, I mused, than an in-state freshman spent on a year’s tuition at the University of North Carolina. Foolishly, I broached the subject with the bride, someone I considered to have a social conscience. “Doesn’t it depress you to spend that much money on a dress you’re going to wear for five hours?” I asked. “But, Lauren,” she replied, “they’re the most important five hours of my life.”

Most engaged people spend more time preparing for their weddings than they do preparing for their marriages.

Turned out I was wrong about the five hours: Karen wore that dress at least twice as long. That’s something else I’ve noticed about weddings, something my mother swears was not true when she was in her twenties: they last forever. In September I attended a wedding in Toronto. It began in mid afternoon, the ceremony lasted an hour, we mingled and munched on appetizers until the dinner began around 6:00. When I left at midnight, the party was still going strong: the speeches were finally over, the dancing had just begun, and neither the bride, nor the groom, nor most of the guests showed any signs of retiring. “Don’t they want to leave?” I whispered to my escort at about 11:00. “It is their wedding night. Don’t you think they’d want to get on with that?” “Why?” he asked. “It’s not every day that they have all their friends gathered in one place at a party, the sole purpose of which is to toast them. They sleep in the same bed all the time.”

He had a point. I tallied up the weddings I’d been invited to in the last two years: sixteen. Weddings of black Baptists, Orthodox Jews, secular Israelis, goddess-worshippers, Unitarians, and Christian college grads. Of the 16 couples, 12 had been living together when they got engaged. I guess their wedding nights weren’t that big a deal. So the brides bled money and the newlyweds stayed at the reception until 3:00 in the morning in order to make the day special—when, perhaps, it would have been special without the pheasant on a bed of wild mushroom ragout and the eight-piece band scratching out old-time jazz if married life offered anything different from marriedesque cohabiting.

Used to be that wedding receptions weren’t so important to the bride and groom. The marriage ceremony might be. The wedding night might be. But the party was just that—a party, one that was fun, but one the newlyweds did want to end eventually so that they could go start their lives together. But in an era when you already started your life together, 8 or 14 or 27 months before, when you moved into the same condo or signed the same mortgage before you went shopping for a diamond, the wedding’s all you’ve got to differentiate last week’s premarital bliss from next week’s newlywed bliss.

A few days after the Toronto wedding, my date and I had lunch with the bride. He mentioned that he was homeless for the moment, sleeping on friends’ couches, having had to move out of his apartment before his new digs were ready. “You’re welcome to stay with us,” the bride offered generously.

“That’s kind,” he said, “but you did just get married.”

“Don’t be silly,” she replied, declaring that he would be welcome to their guest room. “Sure we just got married, but nothing’s changed.”