WeddingPalooza Hooey

Salon has an article up about this contest in which 10 lucky couples with children will be chosen to get a free wedding in New York. It is supposedly a move to encourage two-parent households among otherwise-committed African-American couples Race, socioeconomics, and the contest mastermind's ulterior motives aside (she happens to be releasing a book on marriage), this is just another example of something I've believed since before I got married: a lot of people of all social and racial groups who get married don't care about being married. Rather, they want a wedding. The marriage is incidental.

"We can't afford to get married" is a cop out of the highest degree. I got married in Omaha, Nebraska, where a couple can be legally wed for $40 ($15 for the license and $25 for the judge to perform the ceremony). Certainly, there are outside economic factors that sometimes make being married a liability--we waited nearly 3 years to get married in part because we would lose our health insurance--but that is another issue entirely. If having a free wedding is all it takes to get a couple married, they have personal or couple issues that a wedding will not fix, and it does them no service to feed their illusion that all they need for a happy life is a wad of taffeta and a rented tuxedo.

As for the supposed "Stigma of a city hall wedding," again a Steaming Crock of Crap. Hate to break it to people, but no one gives a rat's butt where you got married. Few people will know or remember where the wedding was, and people won't stigmatize based on something they can't readily figure out. Legally speaking (leaving aside certain religion's requirements for a recognized marriage), civil ceremonies leave you no less married. Like so many prejudices, the bias against civil ceremonies is largely propagated by people who have never seen one. We had a lovely ceremony in Courtroom 27, and it was an actual ceremony, not a legal proceeding. The judge gave a talk on the importance of marriage and told a touching story about the Aztecs before we took the standard vows that you would take for any marriage. The court staff assured me we were allowed to bring whomever we wanted to attend the ceremony, and we had our immediate family there. We could have had more than the 12 people there, but we wanted to keep it small. The ceremony was, of course, stripped of a lot of the frou-frou of weddingpaloozas. The choreographed musical procession was pretty much out of the question, and we didn't have time--or inclination--to put out pew bows or huge floral arrangements or candelabras. The proceedings were focused not on how pretty the room was, but on our marriage.

I've said before and I will say it again: we could go a long way in improving marriage if we downplayed the wedding. Ban the butt-bows and dyed-to-match shoes, and you'll find people treating the act of getting married for what it is: a lifelong commitment, not an excuse for a party.