The Wedding Scam

It seems that any time I log onto Facebook and read the engagement announcements in the right hand column of my news feed, I feel a cynical, albeit amusing sense of dread for the would-be newlyweds.

While the nation justifiably inches towards marriage equality, they have neglected to realize that while we are doing so, we should also be collectively vying for marital sanity. Especially where it concerns our wedding day. Because regardless of the amount of X or Y chromosomes that any two people taking the plunge together have, from soup to nuts, the institution requires a complete abandoning of one’s senses. I can only hope that when it comes to the “big day”, that same sex couples have more brains than their heterosexual counterparts.

There will never be another day when you are as financially taken advantage of –with the possible exception of your funeral– than your wedding day. If you’re really lucky, they will both happen on the same day. From the moment you decide to have one of these vapid, typically American “traditional” fiascoes with an obscenely self indulgent, can-you-top-this party immediately thereafter, you begin hemorrhaging money that you probably can’t afford like British Petroleum during the Gulf crisis.

It truly takes a psychosis to do what most Americans do leading up to, and including walking down the aisle. We all know that roughly half of everyone who endeavors matrimony, fails miserably. But subjectivity being what it is, people unknowingly suffer from a hormone induced dementia called “wedding fever”, and as they do so, they make complete fools out of themselves to everyone they know. Then, when it’s our turn, we do the same. It’s a complete cycle of lunacy. Almost without fail, young American future newlyweds fall under the mistaken impression that somehow their love is the stuff written about in story books, and which every chick flick is based.

Here’s a helpful hint to all of my younger readers…. It’s not.

The wedding dress itself is a monument to unreason. In a Walt Disney engendered psychosis which causes otherwise rational women to spend thousands of dollars (that she might want to put towards starting her family) so that she can play a one night performance as a fairy princess. Brides still dress in traditional white, as if we all aren’t painfully aware that even before she met the sap she’s marrying, she’d been legs up more times than a gymnast. I won’t even get into the stupidity of a grown woman who is not royalty wearing a tiara.

These aren’t clothes we wear on our wedding day… they’re costumes. If not for tradition, we might as well be dressed as a Cowboy and a French Maid. And while we’re on the subject of ridiculous nuptial-wear, do you know what no woman in the history of weddings has ever said? “Oh I just loved my bridesmaid dress, it was soooo pretty.” Brides maids dresses are a punishment for all the petty backstabbing that women perpetrate on one another, and they only tolerate it because they hope to return the favor one day.

The penguin-wear that grooms have been conditioned to display is slightly less vacuous, but for only the fact that they are usually only rented, albeit as at obscene expense. While it may be nice to pretend to be James Bond in Monte Carlo –when insipidly tooling around with your band of dim-witted, testosterone rich band of groomsmen– while becoming inebriated in the back of your limousine — one look at the painted snow beast waddling up the aisle — praying that her spaghetti straps don’t burst since she was hoping to be ten pounds lighter before she crammed herself into this ridiculous expenditure — should snap you back into reality.

This all became a foregone conclusion once the stolid suitor made his futile attempt to impress the friends of his betrothed with an engagement ring that might as well have been purchased at a yard sale. No one who looks at it knows it’s value. They only “ooh and ah” because they pretend to. Americans spend thousands on diamonds, when they are truly worthless bits of indulgence, and which, for the average person is indistinguishable from any other piece of glass. We only engage in this idiocy because it’s expect of us, and because if we don’t, we’re afraid that people might think less of us. So we bribe our bride and hope that somehow this farce will translate into a lifetime of oral sex.

It almost never does. And when it happens, it has nothing to do with the ring.

But eventually the wedding is over, and the party begins. We pay big money to feed and entertain our friends and family so that they can hokey-pokey around a disco-ball lit dance floor and work off the eight roving appetizers and choice of prime rib or chicken cordon bleu. Thankfully the fog machine spares most young newlyweds from the horrors of what marriage has done to their glutinous, anxiety ridden wedding guests, and how their children have robbed them of their once youthful exuberance, and their sanity.

All of this is choreographed according to your caterer. Like Pavlov’s poodles, the newly-partnered soul mates marvel at the succession of unoriginal productions performed in their honor. From the tedium of watching your serving staff walk in a circle for the “champagne march” … to the less than fascinating self indulgence of the “Hi-Ho the Cherry-O” version of watching a grown woman cut a cake, and then mash it in the face of her new husband… to backwards flower tossing … it’s all nuts.

… And then we wake up the day after “Happily Ever After”… and we’re married. Walt Disney never mentioned what happens in the sixty years that follow. So maybe it might be a good idea to begin our marriages on a sane note. If you’re considering taking this step in your life, also consider that hopping in line with the other cliff-bound lemmings might not be in your best interest. The white dress, cake, and needless expenditure have NOTHING to do with a lifetime of love, respect, and interdependence.

This is not about money. It’s about sanity.

Love cannot be expressed through needless expenditure. It’s time we forego the pomp, and come to this simple understanding… that we stop playing at love, and learn the difference between Hollywood romance, and what it really takes to be in a marriage that both loves, and endures.
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