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  The church was quite elegant, however, in comparison to the place we chose for the reception: the Sangerbund.

  It's a German beer hall. This wasn't a nostalgic choice about our forebears and our mother country: Neither Dave nor I is German. Neither was it a style choice. Germans aren't known for their gracious hospitality, décor, or food quality. They are known for their beer quality, however, and this seemed to outweigh the other factors at the time.

  That and the price. The Sangerbund was, by far, the cheapest per square foot and per meal. The meal would be something sauerkraut-ish, heavy on the gravy. And it would be served by women in lace-up tops—à la St. Pauli Girl— except the women would all be quite stout and aged.

  Perfecto!

  THE BLURRY DAY ITSELF

  Because weddings are sociological in scope, not psychological, I had the sense throughout it all that Dave and I barely existed. We were already married, in our own way, at the Red Roof Inn off I-95. This was the communal manifestation. This was an adaptation of some sort, something that was only loosely based on us.

  I'll spare you the battling bridesmaids and my brother-in-law's last minute decision not to sing our wedding song because he doesn't like to sing except when there's a real focus on him, and the beauty shop that gave one of my bridesmaids a satellite dish hairdo, and get right to the event itself.

  Dave and I were kept in the church basement right before the wedding in two separate rooms, like holding pens. There was a door between us. I opened it and saw him across the room. He was wearing a rented tuxedo and a red bow tie and cummerbund. He was pacing, hands in his pockets. I whispered his name and he looked up.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi.”

  “I'm getting married,” I said.

  “Me, too!” he said, as if this were the strangest thing. And it did seem like a giant coincidence. Sometimes, still, one of us will say, “I love you” and the other will say it back—but in total amazement. “I love you too!” And sometimes we'll admit to how odd it is. “What are the chances? I love you and you love me.”

  I didn't tear up at this point. I wasn't yet sentimental about Dave. We were both too new to each other. This was more like a weird movie we'd both been chosen to star in. Soon enough it would be over and the paparazzi would ease up and we'd be back to our normal lives. This was something to endure.

  And so when people asked me if I thought I was going to cry at the wedding, I'd shrug. “I don't know.” I can be so unsentimental in so many ways. The traditional wedding— with all of its awwwing and honeyed adoration and cloying sweetness and condescension—well, I couldn't stomach it. I wasn't the type to go soft at flowers and candy. Pity the boyfriend who bought me a stuffed animal for a birthday gift.

  But I didn't realize that the wedding wasn't only about becoming something new. It was also about leaving some other part of myself behind.

  And so my father was the one who started me crying. And he'll always get me. I can't even begin to talk about him here. My God, this man's sweetness and brilliance and his philosophies on life…I can't begin. Here's a quick description: He has, more than once, walked a stranger's baby up and down the aisle of an airplane so that the single mother, traveling alone, could rest a minute.

  He took my arm. We walked into the church and everyone stood up. It was this, too, that got me—this standing up, the formality of it, the respectfulness. The fact that people had come from such distances to be here for this.

  I lost it. I bawled. People had to pass me tissues at the altar. There was a lot of snot. It was ugly.

  But the priest, a true intellectual, a man of great wit and humility, gave an inspired homily. And although I can't begin to understand how they fit together, I remember he quoted Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) and Erma Bombeck and plenty in between. He calmed me down. Dave and I said our homemade vows, which, for all of our wanting in on the words, ended up being very traditional and simple and vowlike.

  Then it was over. We were married.

  And we were loved unsparingly. In fact, we were pressed with so much love that we felt like flowers being flat-tened—wedding-dress bustle and all—into a precious-memories book.

  From here on out, we got lucky. There were some wedding guests who needed a careful eye, but everyone was on their best behavior. A brief accounting:

  Dave's people were also a source of prewedding anxiety. My parental in-laws-to-be, especially. There are three of them—Dave's mother, Dave's father, and Dave's father's wife. I hadn't yet figured out the meaning of the cliché about marrying the whole family. That would take years to decode. And because the in-laws were, by and large, WASPs, their passive aggression was so subtle that I just thought they were all sweet as pie.

  I was nervous about my oldest sister. Kate is nine years older than I am and was living in New York, working as a director/producer, and unmarried. She had, in fact, just broken things off with a man she was about to move in with. The Triple Asshole, my mother had dubbed him. Kate's happiness was of great concern, and there was a strict rule against making any allusions to The Taming of the Shrew in front of her. She did show up (fresh from an impromptu fling in Mexico). At the reception, she took to introducing Dave to people as such: “This is Dave. Julie's first husband.” This was funny, of course. And every time she did it, I actually felt relieved. (My sister is unwieldy and wonderful and bitchy and hilarious and incredibly generous and kind and vicious, etc….)

  Even the conflicting groups—the nuns and college bud-dies—seemed harmonious. My mother relied on nuns throughout her life, and so more than a few showed up. One was in full regalia—the all-white habit with the enormous halolike wimple. We wanted them to be comfortable while at the same time we wanted our drunken friends to have fun—inoffensive fun.

  A word on the young wedding. When you get married young, your friends are young, too. They aren't yet worrying about a merger. They aren't having to dodge in and out to breast-feed or check in with the sitter. They aren't yet tied to their husbands and wives. The young wedding has a greater possibility of being a big, messy, sexy free-for-all. Dave and I still hear bits and pieces of what happened later that night.

  Which brings me to later that night…Dave and I left the wedding as soon as we could. Someone had hunted down my grandfather's Cadillac convertible, which had been sold after he died, and had sweet-talked the people into lending it so that it would be a surprise for us, just to drive around on our wedding day. And it was—a huge surprise, like having my grandfather there with us. We drove it to New Castle, where we had a room at the David Finny Inn. There was a celebration of Old Towne going on with fireworks. We found a window in a hallway that led to a tar roof. We climbed out the window and stood there—me in my wedding gown and him in his tux—among the humming air conditioners and watched the fireworks. The fireworks seemed personal. We took them personally—a celebration for just the two of us.

  We were new then, our lives stretched out before us. Our families had let us go. Our children had yet to find us. For this very short time, it would be just the two of us—just us two kids. It was a honeymoon, and we were eventually honeymoonish. But before all of that began, I should tell that I remember this vividly: We opened the guests' envelopes filled with checks and money. I don't know which of us tossed a handful into the air first or climbed onto the bed and started jumping. But we both ended up there—throwing the money into the air while jumping on the bed, throwing and laughing and jumping, until we ran out of breath.

  the wedding vow

  curtis sittenfeld

  I grew up in a family of wedding junkies. One of my earliest memories is of waking around four in the morning on July 29, 1981, to watch Lady Diana and Prince Charles exchange vows. This was shortly before my sixth birthday, and my family crowded in front of the tiny television in the cabin in rural Minnesota where we were on vacation. Mostly what I recall is the sprawl of Diana's train (twentyfive feet of taffeta and lace), the general grandeur of the proc
eedings, and the sense that if ever there was an event worth waking up in the middle of the night for, this was it.

  A few years later, when my parents were planning to attend the wedding of family friends in our hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, a message was relayed the Saturday morning before the ceremony: The groom, who was in his early twenties and had charmed my older sister, Tiernan, and me with his friendliness and goofy energy, had just learned that the two of us were not invited to the wedding and he'd called himself to say he wanted us there. This development was treated by all Sittenfelds with as much urgency and reverence as if the president of the United States had requested a private audience with us. Dresses! Shoes! White gloves! Chop-chop! (And, yes—as little girls, Tiernan and I really did, on special occasions, wear white gloves.)

  At the weddings we didn't accompany our parents to, our father would wrap slices of cake in cocktail napkins, slip them in his jacket pocket, and give them to us the next morning, the white icing slightly smeared, the edge of a pink or purple sugared rose still visible. I've heard that some children sleep with a slice of wedding cake under their pillow, believing they'll dream that night of the person they're meant to marry. For my family, the magic and mysticism of the wedding cake resided more in how it tasted. We're all enthusiastic eaters, and we considered creamy, buttery wedding cake to be about as good as it got.

  During adolescence, weddings continued to hold a special place in my imagination. At my boarding school, they regularly occurred in the campus chapel, and I plotted with another girl in my dorm—though we never had the nerve to go through with it—to crash one. It wasn't that we had visions, à la Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, of knocking back free drinks and seducing guests; we just imagined the ceremony would be really romantic, and it would be fun to see the bride's dress. Meanwhile, for years, my younger sister, Jo, and I played the same game when we were killing time on car trips or jogs: If you got married tomorrow, who would your bridesmaids be? And you can't say more than ten. Sometimes, secondarily, we'd also pick grooms.

  I suspect it was my excessive reverence for all things matrimonial that led to my own wedding vow, which, unlike most wedding vows, involved no one besides myself: When I was twenty-two, I made a pledge that I'd attend every wedding I was invited to. Like a religious zealot whose moral failures only make her more determined to stay the course, my own vow came about because of a slipup of sorts. I failed to attend the first wedding of my peers, and then I repented by going to every other wedding for the next seven years—no matter how far away, how expensive, or how tenuous my relationship to the couple.

  The wedding I didn't go to took place the summer I graduated from college. I was interning at a newspaper in North Carolina, my friends were getting married in Southern California, my then-boss didn't want me to take time off (I often worked on the weekends), and I had grown apart from the friends I'd once shared with the bride and groom. Plus it was going to be a Mormon wedding, so it wasn't even like the awkwardness could be smoothed over with booze. All of which is to say, my reasons for not showing up make perfect sense to me now—and yet I didn't let myself get away with such excuses again for years to come.

  After the fact, it weighed on me that I hadn't gone. I once again ended up living in the same city as the couple, and when they showed me pictures from the big day, I felt pangs of remorse. Besides being a huge personal milestone, I told myself, weddings are an act of optimism, a time when people come together for happy rather than unhappy reasons. And I hadn't been there. Thus was born my wedding vow.

  I made the vow in 1997, and over the next seven years, I'd guess that I attended twenty weddings: the four-day Pakistani-Indian extravaganza in Florida where I, too, came away with henna-decorated palms; the backyard affair in New Hampshire where the bride was barefoot, with blue toenails; the ceremony between two of my former college TAs, where the photographer was moved to give a toast with his mouth full; the autumn wedding where the bride was pregnant; the wedding where I slept in a college dorm; the wedding where I slept in a cabin at a camp; the wedding on the beach where I couldn't hear the vows; the wedding on an outdoor stage where I couldn't hear the vows; the wedding by the lake where I couldn't hear the vows. (And I'm not, as far as I know, deaf, so as a bit of friendly advice—if you're springing for the salmon dinner and the tulle veil, you might want to spring for a microphone, too.)

  Had I not made my vow, I still would have gone to a lot of these weddings. Even so, not having to stop and think about it gave life a certain clarity. I never did those social math equations in which you take your affection for your friends, plus the juicy possibility of hooking up with another guest, minus the expense of a plane ticket and hotel room, minus the time suckage/shlepping factor, and all of it either does or doesn't equal a positive number. For me, it was a positive number—a positive answer—from the beginning. In fact, it's recently occurred to me that I may have accepted wedding invitations the bride and groom sent with the assumption that I'd decline. I picture the couple tallying their guest numbers and getting to the names they're on the fence about. “Hey, what about Curtis— should we invite her?” the groom asks. “Well, we're in Seattle, and she's in Boston,” the bride replies. “Plus, I haven't laid eyes on her for seven years. So I'm sure she won't come, but what the hell? If we send her an invitation, at least maybe she'll give us that Waring Professional Belgian Waffle Iron off the registry.” Naturally, this scene is followed by me pulling the oversized ivory envelope from my mailbox and dashing upstairs to book my plane ticket immediately.

  Even when attending a particular wedding really didn't make logistical sense, I'd simply employ the nuptial version of heroic measures. In 2003, I was living in Washington, D.C., and working as a part-time English teacher, and I'd agreed to cochaperone a group of high school students traveling to New Mexico on a Sunday morning in July. Then I learned my friends Alan and Christine were getting married in Rhode Island the Saturday night before. A conflict? Hardly! What I'd do, I decided, was attend Alan and Chris-tine's afternoon wedding, go to their reception for about an hour (you know—long enough for me to get the reception's flavor, and for them to feel the beneficence of my presence), return my rental car to the Providence airport, fly from Providence to Baltimore Washington International Airport, spend Saturday night at an airport hotel, and meet the students and the other chaperone in the morning before our plane departed for Albuquerque.

  This is pretty much how things proceeded and it was a lovely wedding—it was genuinely moving to see the couple's families together, and the reception was at a mansion overlooking the glittery Atlantic Ocean. Then, after my allotted hour at the reception, I got lost on my way back to the airport and ended up frantically filling the gas tank of the rental car while trying to change out of my wedding shoes and wondering if I was going to miss my plane—and it was hard not to wonder, What am I doing?

  At just about every wedding I went to, there were two moments that occurred. Moment A was the one in which I'd think, This is so touching. Truly, these displays of familial and romantic love restore my faith in humanity. God bless the universe! Moment B, which happened with increasing frequency, was the opposite: Who are these people, and why exactly am I here among them? The sheer number of weddings I attended also made me see how repetitive they are, and it made me wary of the most elaborate and expensive ones—no matter how much trouble you go to or how much money you spend, it still only lasts a weekend.

  I'm pretty sure my wedding-vow-induced wedding cynicism peaked during a wedding that occurred two weeks before I moved cross-country. Distracted with packing up my apartment (or, more accurately, distracted by my all-consuming avoidance of packing), I didn't realize until just a few days beforehand that I was uncertain about the details of the rehearsal dinner. I e-mailed a friend who also would be a guest, and he e-mailed back informing me, as delicately as possible, that while there was in fact a rehearsal dinner, it appeared that I was not invited. Wait a second, I thought. I'm flying to this weddi
ng right in the middle of all my moving chaos, and I didn't even make the rehearsal dinner cut? I considered not going—if I were to fake strep throat, I wondered, would the ideal day to hoarsely call the bride be Thursday or Friday?—and this was the first time it occurred to me that the net effect of the wedding weekend would have been the same, but I'd have enjoyed myself much more, if I'd just said no, then stood in my apartment, burned five hundred dollars, and hung out at home.

  Ultimately, of course, I did go to that wedding, and I had multiple Moment As and Moment Bs. And then at the very end of the night, literally while I was standing in the driveway waiting for the van taking guests back to the hotel, I began bantering with a guy I knew only dimly. A few days later, back at home, I e-mailed him, and the exchange turned into some of the best e-mailing of my life, eventually punctuated by two weekend visits. Sometimes after receiving one of Driveway Guy's smart, funny, and thoroughly entertaining e-mails, I'd think, I can't believe I almost didn't go to that wedding! Because then this thrilling new relationship in which I will surely find long-term love would never have happened! Long live my wedding vow! Pretty soon, however, it became obvious that Driveway Guy and I got along much better over the computer than in person—the awkwardness of our first weekend together was surpassed only by the awkwardness of our second one—and then I didn't know what to think. That attending the wedding where we'd struck up the conversation had been pointless? That my wedding vow itself was pointless? That I had completely forgotten the reason I'd made the vow in the first place and become a matrimonial mercenary?