If there’s anything worse than receiving an invitation to a destination wedding I haven’t experienced it. I don’t know where and how these started. When I was a child my parents went to weddings and came back the same night, not three days later. They didn’t have to book a fucking airline ticket. Usually returning with candy-coated almonds in white netting and a matchbook with the names of the bride and groom on it, not luggage.
In the ’70s children didn’t go to weddings, they were grown-up events. People could smoke and drink in peace. They hardly interacted with their children at home much less in public. At the time, my parents attending a wedding was akin to them hosting the Met Gala. Nothing in our lives could match the glamour of the day of a wedding. My mother in her mink stole, my father his tux. Spritzed in cologne and perfume they clicked out of our house and drove to Long Island or Brooklyn or New Jersey. And they sat at tables with assigned seats and were served steak or fish and danced to a live band. Later the bride and groom would visit each table. The bride holding a pillowcase for the guests to drop their envelopes into. (These were usually Italian-American weddings, money was the preferred gift, and the couple went around collecting checks like Halloween candy.) I had no firsthand experience of weddings. They existed only in my imagination.
My mother always decreed the next day that the wedding was lovely. I was desperate for details, but to get any more information out of my mother you’d have to waterboard her. She did not gossip or often say unkind things about others, which was unfortunate for me, as that was all I wanted to hear. To her these were adult affairs, not to be discussed with children. Which only made them that much more enticing, my mind concocting opulent soirees out of The Great Gatsby (which I knew from the paperback cover and the Robert Redford/Mia Farrow film I saw at seven).
It wasn’t until I went to my first wedding as a teenager at Leonard’s of Great Neck on Long Island (a reception hall that was more like Teresa Giudice’s home on The Real Housewives of New Jersey than Gatsby’s mansion, which, to add insult to injury, is also located on Long Island) that I realized just how much my imagination overshot reality. I don’t know quite what I was expecting. But certainly nothing that had competing brides in different rooms of the same reception hall. “You mean there’s more than one wedding going on here at the same time?” My jaw dropped to the mint-green carpeted ground. What could be less special than that, I thought at fifteen. (This was one of the first in many lessons I would receive that real-life experiences rarely match what we imagine them to be in our heads. The following years are to be a constant stream of disappointments and mental readjustments. The only thing that’s exactly how you picture it in your head is Venice. It is that magical. Everything else falls short.)
Like most people, the first round of weddings I attend as an adult is in my mid-twenties. This is when many of your friends from high school and college embark on their starter marriages. (Anyone who gets married in their twenties will not be in their forties. This is a fact.) Going to weddings in your twenties is not without its perks. Free dinner. Dancing. And in most cases an open bar. If you find yourself at a wedding with a cash bar you can be certain that this will be the only topic of conversation among the guests. Indignant whispers spreading across the rented hall like wildfire. Being unable to afford an open bar should be your first indicator that this marriage is headed for disaster. If the fondest memory you’re creating involves guests rummaging through their pockets trying to cobble enough bills together to pay for a gin and tonic you’re setting a very low bar for the rest of your life.
(A strange thing about the weddings you attend when you’re young that you don’t realize at the time because, well, you’re young and you have, like, not much to go by, is that this is likely the last time you will see the bride and groom. In many ways a wedding is like a goodbye to your friend and the person they’re marrying that you inevitably dislike. (Occasionally, you will like both members of the couple. These are the marriages that will fizzle out the quickest.) The friend you were barely interested in now has a partner that you care even less about. Sometimes you hold on to the friendship a bit past the wedding. Go through several long and torturous rescheduled dinners where you discover you have less and less in common. Maybe make it to the first pregnancy. But I find it best to cut the cord right then and there at the reception. Give your gift and wish them well. If it’s meant to be your friend will resurface after the divorce.)
Weddings were often a harmless diversion. An activity that allowed you to talk shit about people you hardly see, wonder why you were invited, and complain about the food. But something hideous happened over the decades, and what was once a local evening of dress-up and boozing transformed itself into a faraway, multiday activity-laden obligation that more closely resembled a corporate retreat. I didn’t even want to go to a wedding when it involved a drive longer than an hour, already planning my escape before I’ve even left the house. But now, air travel is involved. This is also something you are expected to pay for and take time off work for. It’s like asking a stranger on the street to plan your vacation and then handing them your credit card. (I feel similarly about destination weddings as I do cash bars. Unless you are paying to have us all travel on private jets and stay in our own villas, knock it off.) The wedding will still be the same god-awful affair. Trite speeches that everyone thinks are clever, cringe-worthy toasts and mind-numbing conversations with someone else’s relatives. I don’t want to have dinner with you the night before your wedding. And I certainly don’t want to have brunch with you the day after it. There are only so many times one can dodge the same people. Hiding behind walls in hotel hallways until the mother of the groom and her sister pass. A person you innocently talk to the night before now becomes a booby trap you have to avoid for the rest of the trip. Any social event is rife with enough awkward moments. To stretch one out from a Thursday through Monday is unconscionable. I don’t believe I know any human being well enough that they should feel comfortable asking me to fly to the Bahamas for a piece of chicken.
There’s also something about people professing their love for each other in public that makes me inherently uncomfortable. It’s just so … personal. We wouldn’t be expected to watch them have sex, why do we have to hear them talk about all the intimate details of their relationship? Other than their therapist I can’t imagine who this would be of interest to. All brides and grooms are total narcissists, the universe revolving around them. Their love story so unique (even though it sounds like every other one), they are the stars and we are their supporting cast whose part it is to fawn and laugh on cue. To compliment and cry. To be joyful. To make this perfect for them. And that is a lot of pressure to put on people who had to change planes and drive in a minivan with strangers in order to reach an event space that ends up looking remarkably similar to any number of ones back home.
But perhaps I only feel this way because I never thought I could get married as a child. Marriage was something that was never going to be a part of my life. Was never for me. This was reserved for other people. Whose love mattered more than mine ever would. Mine counted for less. Had no value. Was funny, even. Made people uncomfortable. Which is maybe why their love made me uncomfortable. And maybe I was jealous. Of what I couldn’t have. Of counting for less when they seemed to count for so much more.
Then the world spins. And spins and spins and spins some more and slowly, so slowly there is change. And now I have someone in my life, have had someone for many years. And my love suddenly is something that I, too, can celebrate. And I understand something that I perhaps didn’t before. Not really. There is power in saying to your friends and family. To the world. “I love this person. I want to share this with you. I want you to know me.”
And this someone in my life, this man, Brad, becomes my husband when I am fifty. And in front of our families we profess our love for each other. This intimate thing now seems okay to share. More than okay, wonderful. (Shame is a hard thing to shake off when it has been baked in for so long.) And this wedding, our wedding, takes place on a fourteen-day cruise in the middle of the Caribbean. I mean if you’re going to do a destination wedding, fucking do it.