Things I love About Weddings

These are 3 things I love about weddings:

(1) It's a celebration of love

(2) It's a public declaration of your place and aspirations in the world

(3) It usually involves a big party and a really swanky holiday afterwards

Also, you usually gets lots and lots of gifts. Plus if you're really lucky, these just might be gifts you're going to love to have around for the next twenty years. 

Here are 3 things which complicate those 3 things above:

(1) It involves children and families

(2) It involves friends who will be as annoying as possible, give their unwanted opinion on everything and then lose it completely by acting out on the day. Here's a related blog about the annoying friend.

(3) It involves dealing with businesses who think "wedding" means "fleecing"

Again, I'd like to stress that I'm not down on weddings and although I'm as baffled as anything that I actually got married, I support what, in essence, it represents.  (!) I also believe that you can be with someone for the rest of your life and have a fulfilling and happy life without getting married.

My number one pet peeve about a "wedding" is that some people really confuse it with the "marriage". Sometimes, unfortunately, these same people are your friends and family. For me, the only thing our wedding has to do with with our marriage is that, for the purposes of anniversaries, our wedding date is our wedding day anniversary.

For all intents and purposes, I consider my marriage to have begun when I decided to commit myself to this person and we began to work towards common goals together. This happened three years before we contemplated hosting a wedding. Hmm...