For better or for worse...

So I was at a wedding last weekend. Avec l'homme. And since a lot of our mutual acquaintances are getting married or planning to get married, weddings have been on the brain of late.

The weekend wedding was quite lovely, except for some parts where I was whispering to the Falklander that I was going to have to go throw up in the bushes for a few minutes, and that if the priest at my wedding called me a princess I would shove my bouquet down his throat and drown him in the font.

However, the bride was beautiful, the groom was handsome, and the wedding party all charmingly attired and flowered. The wedding took place in a garden, the reception in a dining room with vaulted ceilings and huge windows. There were two ponds to walk around for exercise or to escape the small talk, and the weather was gorgeous. The whole thing was exactly as though it had been planned in two colour coded 3 inch binders for the past year. Which it had.

This particular wedding was full of celebration, which all weddings should have in abundance, but short on reality. It was the perfect fairy tale wedding.

I think the thing that really bothered me was that the wedding seemed not to reflect the reality that my dear friends were diving into. Marriage is hard, HARD work. The divorce rates show that, statistically, (the most heinous kind of proof), 50% of marriages in North America don't last. Children, finances, stress of living with another person and modifying ones own life to accommodate theirs takes its toll eventually. Perhaps the generation I belong to has less gumption and stick-to-it-ness than that of my grandparents or even my parents. Or maybe society has changed to recognize that a lot of the long lived marriages of the past were not the Hallmark card platitudes that we were led to believe. Either way, marriage in this particular day and age, seems-to the cynical-a bit of a waste of time.

But, cynical and black hearted though I am, I don't think this marriage was a waste of time. I think it was wonderful and necessary and one small public statement of the kind of love that we are short on in our troubled times. I just wish a few more things had been said:

A recognition that my friends are extremely brave. That marriage is difficult and challenging and terrifying, even for such young bright people. That hard times will occur. That they are both strong individuals and that marriage should not subvert their individuality, but strengthen both of them as people.

I hope that one day I will be as brave as they are, not stop running full tilt toward the precipice of the unknown and the unknowable.