From my friend Evelyn

So Evelyn and I go way back. WAAY back to the days when we were both single, working for a sex ed advocacy group, and stalking potential boyfriends. Well not stalking but going to the alley behind their apartments to see if their light was on and they were really sick. Anyway, our history with weddings goes back too. Evelyn "hired" me to be the coordinator at her friend Emma's wedding and gave me the opportunity to coordinated her own wedding. The wedding was a blast, even more me and J who were running it. Evelyn and her fella were crazy organized and were that couple that really worked well together and enjoyed each other's company. It helped that her fella, Rikel, had an awesome family that was supportive, helpful, and fun. Anyway, since the wedding Evelyn and I talk a lot about weddings and the weird dynamics that end up happening. She wrote this email to me and is allowing me to reprint it here. It think it captures a lot of how i feel about weddings.

From Evelyn:

I attended a very weird wedding a couple of weekends ago. Let me just provide you with some background information -- the groom is a very nice guy, dorky, white, and incredibly picky eater. He's been dating a -- you guessed it! -- a golden sister for the last 8 years or so -- they met in high school. She is petite, cute, a nurse, and ... how do I say this delicately? ... a psychotic bitch. i'm not sure that I've ever heard her utter more than 10 words in public, and when she does speak, its never above a faint squeak.

He is a friend of Rikel's and several months ago, Rikel told me that he was worried about his friend's upcoming nuptials. his friend would say things about his own wedding like, "you don't realize you've made this huge decision, and when you do, its like you are in deep, black hole that you can't get out of it." and then, "ha ha, isn't that funny?" then he opened up to Rikel a bit more, the Bride has some anger issues. She was really set on getting married on 06/07/08, and after two years of searching for the perfect location for our wedding, we found it. however, it was booked for the day she wanted, and so the Bride spent two hours crying and throwing stuff around the apartment." Or, "Oh yeah, the Bride and I went to a park two hours away, and we thought it would be fun to play croquet. But then she started to lose and was so mad, and threw such a huge fit that we had to leave right away." Anyway, there are a whole slew of stories about the Bride basically throwing temper tantrums over ridiculously little things. her fiance (now husband) sums it up by saying, "The Birde may not look it, but she's pretty scary when things don't go her way." He's suggested a number of times that she "sees someone" about her anger management issues.

Anyway, we attended their wedding and I must admit that everything was beautiful. flowers were gorgeous, her dress was beautiful, everything was meticulously well planned. They had been engaged for over two years. but there was something sad about it too ... and when I thought about it later, I realized what it did NOT have -- joy. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that you can plan for joy, but its something that has to come 100% from the couple. The couple sets the tone for how much "joy" there is at the wedding, and honestly, the bride seems to have more influence in this department than the groom. This I think is why those Bridezilla shows are also so depressing. So many of the brides lack joy at their own wedding and it shows.

let me give you a few examples of what happens at a joyless wedding:

1) no emotion of any sort during the ceremony from ANYONE. no one -- not even the parents and relatives -- teared up during the ceremony.

2) the groom had been telling us that he and the Bride had been taking dance lessons for months. Even 3 days before the ceremony, they had to go to the space for a dance rehearsal. The result: a basic foxtrot with the groom nervously counting each beat the entire time. it was perfectly choreographed, but it was not fun, and definitely not romantic. you could have programmed two robots to dance the foxtrot and have gotten the same effect.

3) when guests were invited to dance, no one did.

4) people left as early as they could.

This isn't too say that just because the wedding is joyless means that the marriage is doomed to fail (though they are probably positively correlated) ... but if you want to throw a good and fun wedding that won't have people staring at their watches, it seems that the bride needs to loosen up a bit! But really, I kept thinking about their possible children, and how much it would suck to be raised by a mother who showed no emotion at all except occasional psychotic outbursts of anger. yuck.

Finally, one other bit of wedding related gossip(?) you may find interesting ... so my friend B was telling me that when she and her husband were living on an Indian reservation, they found some of their friends' over-the-top, extravagant weddings a bit hard to take. They were totally disoriented since they were coming from a place of abject poverty into "platinum" weddings. So they initiated a secret "protest gift" when they had to attend a wedding that they thought was either a) a bad idea; b). was needlessly ostentatious ... or c) both.

The protest gift? A salad tosser. Then they would wait for the thank you note ... praying -- PRAYING -- it would go something like this:

Dear B and J,

Thank you so much for sharing our special day . We loved the gift. In fact, I just can't wait to come home from work everyday just so I can toss Sammy's salad. I am sure that your gift will bring us many years of salad tossing.

Love,

Muffy and Sammy

So, to Rikel's absolute horror, guess what gift I bought for the Bride's wedding?

Heh.