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  The game I used to play with my sister notwithstanding, these days I myself would never want to have ten bridesmaids. In fact, when it comes time to plan my own wedding (which I see as neither imminent nor terribly distant—I now live with my boyfriend of two and a half years) I hope to make it as low-key as possible. I've even floated the idea of eloping, which neither my boyfriend nor my family likes. Barring that, I'd want it to be informal and small—a fifty-person gathering one afternoon in a park, say, or a backyard. Presumably, this would mean not inviting some of the people whose weddings I myself traveled so far for, those brides and grooms whose vows I teared up at, whose champagne I drank and whose cousins I flirted with. And while once I imagined that not being invited to a wedding would surely, for anyone, be a grievous disappointment and insult, I guess it's a mark of how much the wedding vow changed my view that I now suspect plenty of people I know would see such exclusion as a relief.

  In the end, when I finally didn't show up for a wedding, it was less a decision I made than one fate made for me. My friend Katharine, a former coworker, was marrying her fiancé Jim in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend of 2004. I was living in Washington, D.C., and on the morning I was to fly west, I got an ocular migraine, which meant I was seeing greenish spots that made it difficult to do anything except lie down and close my eyes. After a few hours, the migraine subsided enough that I decided I could take a cab to the airport. Missing the wedding, after all, was not an option.

  But as we crossed the Potomac, I felt increasingly queasy. (Perhaps this was my karmic punishment for considering faking sick two years earlier.) By the time we'd reached the airport, I'd broken into a clammy sweat, and throwing up did not seem beyond the realm of possibility. As someone who'd once fainted on a plane—an experience that's both melodramatic and truly disgusting—I knew it would be foolish to board a cross-country flight. Which meant I wasn't going to the wedding. Which meant, at long last, I'd broken my vow.

  Later in the day, back at my apartment, when I called the bride to apologize, I couldn't help thinking of how at receptions in the past, I'd always noticed the handful of table assignment cards that weren't retrieved. I'd wonder, Who flakes on coming to a wedding at the last minute?

  I definitely felt uncomfortable about my own last-minute flake-out, and sad to miss celebrating with Katharine and Jim. But ending my perfect attendance streak, however involuntarily, also turned out to be liberating. Unlike when I was twenty-two, I learned I could, at twenty-nine, miss a wedding, feel bad…and then move on. In fact, to truly beat myself up about it was kind of arrogant—surely, the wedding had proceeded just fine without me. In fact, it was quite possible that the bride and groom had noticed my absence exactly zero times. I also realized that it probably wasn't a coincidence I'd gotten the ocular migraine when I had—the week preceding Katharine and Jim's wedding had been one in which I helped my boyfriend move from D.C. to Philadelphia, I attended several days' worth of back-to-school faculty meetings, and I had multiple deadlines for freelance articles. A normal person might have recognized from the start that declining to attend the wedding would not reflect a lack of affection for Katharine. But I'd been so hell-bent on keeping my vow that I'd stopped seeing the forest for the trees. I'd forgotten that weddings are a lot of fun largely because when you're at one, you're in the mood to enjoy yourself. If you can't or won't enjoy yourself, well, you probably shouldn't go. With this hard-won lesson in mind, I've skipped a handful of weddings in the last few years. Miraculously, the world has continued to spin on its axis.

  When I look back, I don't regret making my vow, but because it made me more of a wedding cynic, I'm not sure I'd recommend it, either. Or maybe it's that I became a cynic because I'd been such a wedding sucker to start with; I'd been one of those people who makes it into her twenties still thinking of weddings as magical occasions sprinkled with fairy dust. If you never in the first place believe such a thing, then you'd never experience the disappointment of realizing you were wrong—or the excitement, in certain moments at certain weddings, of being completely right.

  diana, martha, and me

  catherine ingrassia

  The first time I saw Martha Stewart's Weddings, I was standing in a Chicago Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in 1987 entranced by Martha's smile and the towering wedding cake beside her. A graduate student who couldn't even afford to buy the $50 book, I leafed through the oversize volume imagining how I could someday fashion my own wedding with the same WASPy patina of privilege and effortlessly worn elegance. The pages characterized a wedding as “monumental,” “the richest…of all the events in the course of a human life,” “the most magical, most fanciful event conceivable”—lofty terms for a basic union. Though I had just met the man who would become my husband, weddings were not necessarily on my mind. Nevertheless the preoccupation with that ritual and the seeming inevitability of someday getting married made the book very seductive. A few years earlier, I, like 750 million other people, had indulged my fascination with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in July 1981, watching all three networks on three different televisions simultaneously (just in case one of them got a different angle of “the dress”). It was a wedding to which we all could aspire.

  Stewart's book and Princess Diana's wedding became touchstones for an entire generation of women and created specific expectations that still influence weddings. Never before in the history of the world has more time, energy, and money been spent on weddings. Today, the average American wedding costs $26,800 (more than half the median household income), a price that has increased by 400 percent over the last twenty years. At the same time that we spend upward of $125 billion a year on weddings, we have a 50 percent divorce rate, the highest among Western countries. How can we reconcile this ceremonial expenditure and this institutional failure? What do weddings mean in a culture in which 90 percent of the people will ultimately marry, but more than half of those marriages will end in divorce?

  As an academic with a focus on women's literature and history, my own relationship with weddings was complicated. The first wedding I was in (and the first I remember with any detail) was my aunt's in 1974. A large, formal Italian wedding befitting both the youngest child and the only daughter in the family, the entire experience, from the size of the engagement ring (two carats) to the venues for the ceremony (Catholic church) and the reception (country club), imprinted on my young brain what a “real” wedding was supposed to look like. What impressed me most, perhaps, was the Italian wedding cake: five towering layers of cannoli cake, each supported by a battalion of white porcelain cupids with an illuminated green fountain in the first layer. (Inexplicably, I still have one of the porcelain cupids.) The ivory dress, adorned with seed pearls, was preserved, and the pictures of the wedding hung on my paternal grandmother's wall for nearly twenty years.

  Despite my early fascination with my aunt's wedding, I got married in pink. I saw the Demetrios dress in a magazine, tried it on at the same Italian bridal shop where my aunt had purchased her dress, and never looked back. I had a sapphire, not a diamond, engagement ring, I never considered changing my name (nor did my husband consider asking me to), and I ended up with a wedding that was a bit of a religious and cultural pastiche. I really wanted to be married in a Catholic church, a desire thwarted by the fact that I wasn't actually Catholic. In 1990, my husband and I were married in an unadorned Unitarian church under a chuppah, with “Ave Maria” playing as a tacit nod to Catholicism. The wedding and the reception (complete with sit-down dinner for 150), for which my parents paid for everything, were grand. But, like the weddings of many people who get married in their twenties, it was really my parents' party, not mine. I never created an album of wedding pictures, never hung the “wedding shot” on the wall, and, I think, never really felt ownership over the experience.

  As women marry later—the average age for the bride is twenty-seven, twenty-nine for the groom—the bridal couple increasingly assumes the financial responsibilities
for the event. Currently, nearly a third of couples pay for their own weddings, and less than 25 percent of brides have parents who pay for everything. Couples go into debt to throw a wedding and fall victim to the power of the wedding industry, which repeatedly tells them the importance of the event and its centrality to their own lives. Yet how important is it, and what meaning do we invest in the traditions associated with it?

  The original ceremony of marriage has rather humble beginnings. While the first marriages were basically a form of kidnapping (an act that instituted the practice of groomsmen to help the groom keep the bride's irate family at bay), most unions between a man and a woman created alliances between two groups. The exchange of a valuable object— the bride, money, livestock—solidified that relationship. The term “wedding” itself originally meant “to pledge, wager, or stake”—with a very specific reference to the financial vow made. A bride was, if not purchased, then offered as an item in exchange. The husband and his family, in essence, bought the bride and the property (dowry or goods) she brought with her. In fact, in the eighteenth century, British newspapers published the amount of a woman's dowry with the wedding announcement. When a father gave away his daughter, he contractually entered into a financial union, not a romantic one, and as a result the chastity of the bride was of paramount importance to ensure an appropriate line of inheritance.

  Many people assume that the white dress, now standard in most American weddings, symbolically represented the bride's virginity and was always a central part of wedding customs. Actually, that's a retroactive (and erroneous) myth. Though white gowns were occasionally worn by brides in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the white dress did not become a wedding tradition until after Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding, which, like Princess Diana's, had a profound influence on wedding practices and popular traditions. The original wearing of white coincided with a class-based desire to make the wedding an opportunity for public displays of wealth. White is an incredibly impractical fabric to sew or wear, and a white dress would have been owned only by those who wouldn't risk getting it dirty.

  During this period, even fabulously rich brides—including Queen Victoria—typically had their wedding dresses remade as evening gowns. In the nineteenth century, the average American woman got married in her best dress or had a dress made that would then become her best dress. Blue (associated with constancy and virginity) and yellow were favorite colors for wedding gowns, although many a bride (especially on the frontier) would have been married in black, since it was a more practical color. The inevitable obsolescence that now characterizes wedding dresses would have been unheard of in earlier times. So would the average amount of $800 spent on a dress today.

  Many other popular “traditions” of the American wedding are a product of marketing and commercialism. The diamond engagement ring? De Beers Diamonds, which was founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1888 and became the world's largest diamond mining company, organized a marketing campaign that equated the diamond with engagement rings, culminating in the 1948 tagline “A diamond is forever.” Wedding veils? Roman brides typically wore brightly colored veils to ward off evil spirits (not to demonstrate modesty), but the practice of wearing a veil did not emerge again until the late nineteenth century with the cultural preoccupation for feminine modesty and decorum. White, multilayer wedding cakes? While the symbolic breaking of bread had long been part of a wedding ceremony, the many frosted white layers that now signal “weddings” were not even technologically possible until the beginning of the twentieth century. The development of white sugar paste frosting (1888) and the ability to tier the layers with pillars (1902) created the precursor of the modern wedding cake.

  Should it matter to us that these popular traditions are relatively new? As a culture we make meaning of weddings through white dresses, wedding cakes, and veils; they're the lens through which we read romantic unions. So, like all traditions, they're as real as we make them—which is to say, very real indeed. That reality became apparent to me when I finally got my copy of Martha Stewart's Weddings. I recently found a used copy on the Internet for $3.54. I thought that it would strike me as outmoded, some sort of time capsule providing a window into a moment that had passed. Rather the opposite was true. Though happily married for sixteen years, I still found the images as appealing as I had years before—perhaps more so because they provided a vehicle for remembering my own wedding and anticipating my daughter's wedding. (Okay, she's only seven, but a mother can plan ahead….) It may be the same reason that the people who most often cry at weddings are married; witnessing the act of public intimacy that characterizes all marriage ceremonies and hearing the vows that, in any form, promise the same thing remind us of the powerful commitment we've made to another person and to ourselves. The familiarity of the white dress and the cake help us—as individuals and as a culture—find comfort in rituals and process the change a wedding represents. As we celebrate unions together, the ceremony, whether simple or elaborate, provides a sense of order and continuity. When our wedding echoes those of our mothers and grandmothers and perhaps anticipates our daughters', it reminds us of the community of generations that surrounds us. It also helps anchor us. Though perhaps some of us work to balance our professional and personal roles in a time when women's lives are more complicated, we can be secure in our knowledge of what it means to be a bride. So, upon reflection, I've decided that Martha had it right. A wedding is an incredibly rich, magical, and monumental event that allows you to transport yourself into a story that is at once familiar and also completely unique.

  the dress

  one day

  Getting Married on a Budget Later in Life in a Dress My Deceased Mother Made Me, DIY Style

  elizabeth crane

  I was, in many ways, like every other little girl growing up in the sixties and seventies. “One day,” I thought, “I will have a beautiful wedding and it will be the best day of my life.” We were in the era of Gloria Steinem, but we were the children of women who were still finding their way through feminism. Our mothers may have had careers, but they married young; they got divorced but they got married again; they went to work but they still put dinner on the table. I understood early on that marriage, at the very least, shared the top spot on the list of goals. I got it at school and at the movies and on TV and in every women's magazine around our house, even the Cosmo that was in my hot little hands at an entirely age-inappropriate juncture, which may not necessarily have urged marriage but sure as hell didn't want me to be alone. A happy ending was one with a man in it, and it was years before I thought to question this.

  I had many plans for this wedding of the century. They changed over the years, but included any number of dress styles from sleek to poufmongous; locations from the beach on Fire Island to my grandparents' house in Iowa. The grooms were always sort of secondary. Sometimes they were classmates or colleagues, sometimes they were JFK Jr., sometimes Robert Downey Jr. They were, of course, perfect, whoever they were, but the wedding was the thing.

  Somewhere along the line this changed, and I suspect it came in the “I'm in my thirties and I'm not married yet what does it all mean?” era. I became clear about the statistics on marriage, and that as a child of divorce I had perhaps some long-latent negative associations with the institution, but also came to accept the fact that I couldn't marry just anyone, that what I wanted was more than a wedding. I wanted a meaningful commitment that had a chance of lasting. I wanted “picky” to not be a bad word. (Can you tell I heard this a lot? Enough to question whether or not it was true? And finally concluding that it was? And that it was possible that some people, like 50 percent, to quote one commonly heard statistic, were maybe not picky enough? And ultimately to conclude: Right on, I'm picky!) This seemed to go hand in hand with realizing I wasn't just anyone, and that just anyone wouldn't marry me anyway. It's been my experience that it is still difficult in our culture to make decisions like holding off on marriage, or (gasp!) choosing not to marry at all, or
like, let's say, being an artist—anything that strays even slightly to the left of center. Being single for as long as I was in this setting was quite often painful, and though I'd always believed that sharing your life with a partner would be a wonderful thing, in the event that I did not find that person (and evidence suggested strongly to me that I might not), I hoped to be fulfilled and productive and satisfied and useful (and not lonely) regardless of whether I found a mate. Although I was on a slow track to personal and creative success (suffice it to say this is a word I've always had trouble with, but that I've come to understand can and must be defined individually), I met that goal beyond my wildest dreams. Lo and behold, as soon as that happened, who finally came along but The One.

  And let me say too that although we recently celebrated our first anniversary, I am still convinced, in some ways, that I will only know what marriage really means ten years down the road. I know that I'm as in it now as I'll ever be, which is not nothing. In fact, it's more than just something. Although I fail on a regular basis, I work hard on being in the moment, as the Zen/Kabbalists/movie stars/self-helpy people say, and so if you follow the logic, I will certainly never be more legally bound to Ben than I am today, but because it's still so new, my perspective on it is perhaps not as complex as it will be in the future, after we have even more experiences shared as this unit-thing. I agreed, under God and in front of my friends and family, to stick with this dude, and that's my plan. What I mean is, it doesn't seem enough to me to say that I'm legally bound to this person and leave it at that. Or even to say it's a committed relationship. Certainly, I believe that marriage should be defined by each couple making the choice to get married. You wanna have key parties with your neighbors? OK, great, but that's not gonna work for me. What I'm talking about is far more nebulous. What our marriage is now is what I wanted marriage to be. We're equal. Spiritually, mentally, and emotionally equal. Finances couldn't interest me less. I mean, insofar as I like having some, yes, but not in terms of our equality. That said, our entire three years together have been what I truly dreamed of, beyond the white dress fantasies. We don't agree on every last thing, but we communicate fairly easily, and when we don't, we try harder. (When one of us walks away in a huff, we eventually come back together laughing, because it's so out of character for both of us.) We have a lot of similar interests, but I also have similar interests with some random person who reads Us Weekly magazine, so that's only a part of it. We have fun, but I have fun with a lot of people. We make up silly songs, which I occasionally do with a few other people, and we get naked, which I do with no other people ever, unless it involves a paper gown, at which time I promise you I do not enjoy it. We are two very unexamined-life-isn't-worth-living-to-a-ridiculous-degree-prone people, always working through the next thing life brings, even though we haven't weathered any big crises yet (although frankly, we both came to the table having weathered enough trauma for any two people, and I'm hoping we've already had our share). Perhaps that's what I'm waiting for, though, for the ultimate definition, which is wrongheaded of me, I'm sure. I want to prove that we can weather a storm together. But you know, if at all possible, without the storm. Here's the best thing, I think. This marriage makes me feel that it's OK to be me. Not that I ever had a choice, but God knows I tried, for the sake of many other relationships, to be any number of people who weren't me, always failing miserably. I was finally about as close as I'd ever been to being me, and glad to be me, shortly before I met Ben. (Caveat: If you are or were my friend, then you most likely did know me. If I dated you, not so much.) At the same time, this relationship has helped me come to understand that everything isn't about me, anymore, and that apparently it never was anyway (what?), which is frankly a huge fucking relief. If anything I'm more me now, because of Ben.