Last Saturday, I attended my fifth wedding in two years. Because I anticipated knowing all of four people there, including the bride, I dragged a good-hearted friend home with me for the weekend. After seeing a wedding program full of married bridesmaids, hearing one of my friends inform me she’d gotten engaged on the Fourth of July, and listening to the rampant gossip about all the other weddings on the docket, he said, “I can’t wait to get back to Eugene. At least people there are screwed up in normal ways.”
Unlike my suffering friend, I’ve been surrounded by matrimonial bliss for long enough that I’ve ceased to find it traumatizing. After attending two or three of my friends’ weddings, I stopped adding things to my checklist of what shouldn’t be included at my own. I stopped worrying about whether I really believed people my age were ready to commit themselves to someone until death does them part. Weddings don’t scare me anymore.
Not other peoples’ weddings, anyway. Like my friend who couldn’t wait to return to Eugene and hordes of other people I know, the mere thought of being married makes me want to run for the hills. What is it about marriage that we find so scary? The lifetime commitment to one person, probably. At this point, I have a hard enough time keeping track of myself and my own choices, much less worrying about how I’ll affect someone else’s life. Marriage, of course, means always thinking about someone else, because it’s not just your life anymore. And at 20 or 21 or 22, that’s a sacrifice many people, including me, aren’t prepared to make. Maybe that speaks well of us in a society where, even though it seems that marriage is spreading like flu in the residence halls, you hear more about the enormous divorce rate.
But here are some things to consider about weddings. Aside from being a public declaration of love, they’re also a public declaration of independence. Yeah, you read that right. Think about it. Think of the bride’s father giving her away as more than the tradition of the two of them walking down the aisle together. Sure, the law establishes an age where we’re all adults. But it’s at weddings that parents formally surrender their authority over their children.
For the two people getting married, the wedding is an acknowledgment that they’re giving up the freedom so many of us are petrified of losing — and they’re ready for that. It’s their declaration that they’re trading the freedom to look for the right person for the freedom of not having to look anymore. It’s their statement that they’re adults who can make decisions together because they’re secure enough with themselves to be able to consider someone else. And that’s something worth celebrating.
Maybe that’s why weddings don’t traumatize me anymore. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than watching my friends vow to stick it out for the people they love. Maybe if I tour the wedding circuit long enough (and there are plenty more wedding invitations in my future), I’ll learn not to be afraid when I think of myself standing at the altar. I think that’s far enough off in my future that for now, I can save my fears for something else: The day I open my mailbox and find the first birth announcement.