Wedding Fever !

Even though I love a good wedding, I haven’t been to many in the last few years; perhaps it’s become a dying institution or couples simply ‘couldn’t be bothered”

However, thinking about it, it would seem that many of our long-term friends have managed to stay together as if finding divorce an all too gruesome and dare I say it, expensive experience. So, no options to attend recently divorced friend’s weddings as they have ‘another’ shot at the institute of marriage.

My take on this is that even if the few that didn’t make it the first time around and decided to part ways from their long-term spouse then, later on, take a new partner calculated that marriage second time around is an altogether frivolous activity.

I recently read an article on marriage between opposite-sex couples which told me that it has fallen to an all-time low in the U.K. with just 239,000 marriages taking place in 2015, almost half the number that took place in 1940.

What was another interesting fact was that the age of people getting married is also increasing with the average age of newlyweds being 36 meaning that marriage has become a solidly middle-aged activity? One wonders what requests the bride and groom will make for wedding presents. A funeral plot, subscription to an aged facility or vouchers for hip replacements spring to mind.

There are of course many pros and cons when it comes to the institute of marriage. From a personal point of view, as a long-term married man, I am still fairly content with the arrangement. With a ‘lifelong’ partner, one is part of a ‘team’: together we have weathered quite a few storms over the years, too many sometimes, births, deaths, illnesses, upheavals and switching countries on average every 6 years or so.

Being married, if one can succeed at it, can be a wonderfully rewarding experience, most of the time that is. There are times of course when looking at one’s partner, the imagination does conjure up images of murder most foul! We have also come to the conclusion that we have made it financially inconvenient to leave each other.

Throughout all of this diatribe I have referred to the institution as ‘being married,’ not ‘getting married’ which something altogether different!

After years of enduring a wedding drought it would seem that 2018 is the year of plenty when it comes to attending somebody else’s nuptials Now it would appear s that it is the turn or our children’s friends who seem intent on, ‘tying the knot’. These are the kids that carpooled with ours to school and other extracurricular activities, had numerous sleepovers and whose graduations and sporting events we dutifully attended.

Of course, these weddings are never, ‘just down the street’ as we live in Indonesia and so, in order to attend we have to travel vast distances in order to make our presence felt and so we dutifully trek to the U.K. Australia and Canada to mention just a few of the destinations.

Weddings on a scale of 1 – 10 are possibly one of the most stressful and not to mention expensive exercises one can participate in. Planning a wedding is akin to enduring an S.A.S course in Wales during the depth of winter where every obstacle is designed to part you from as much money as possible.

Early in the piece, one will receive a posted, “save the date’ card beautifully handcrafted by some exorbitantly expensive calligrapher informing you of the time and venue when vows will be exchanged. It seems that when a couple gets engaged, they want to share their happy day with all the people they love. 

However, by the time the wedding day has arrived, those self-same people will have miraculously transformed into huge piles of cash that they wish they had never spent. What has to be factored into the equation is that many of one of the partner’s coworkers will gleefully gatecrash the reception extending the venue’s safety capacity way beyond its fire safety limit. Once the celebrations are over, the couple will then spend years harbouring a simmering resentment towards those who supped greedily at the bar and left without so much as a thank you or leaving a wedding gift.

Weddings in my humble opinion are a sure way to guide young couples (and their parents) towards bankruptcy.

Having said that, marriage is indeed great and everyone should try it at least once. These days in cities like London, New York and Vancouver rents are so gigantic that often marriage is the only way out the grotty flat you share with six other starving Australians. Perhaps it will also keep you sane while you are travelling to and from a job that is slowly destroying your will to live. The ostentatious wedding might, just might break the spell of a humdrum existence.

The responsibility and commitment of muttering one's marriage vows however will pale into insignificance as the responsibility and commitment of other such grown-up activities such as owning a house ( with a crippling mortgage) and having kids, which means that the actual wedding itself is essentially just a big, expensive, meaningless party to which you only invite people out of a crushing sense of obligation.

But it’s nice.

Honestly, give it a go.

 Do it for us, as really we don’t mind the travel and having a wonderful day out at someone else’s expense is an experience to savour!

Paul v Walters is the best selling author of several novels and when not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali he occasionally rises to scribble for several international travel and vox pop journals.