Being 27, I’m on the precipice of the wedding phase of my life where I’ll be going to four weddings per year until I’m 32. The first of these weddings was this past weekend where I got to see my friend tie the knot with his college sweetheart in the sunny hills of Napa Valley.
Growing up, I always romanticized weddings as this uniquely tremendous social affair. Everyone would be dressed up to celebrate a lifetime of love with good food, an open bar, and a dance floor, and it’s all such a fun time that you really don’t mind when Cha Cha Slide makes its inevitable arrival to the party.
My expectations were very much in line with reality this weekend, but I was also caught off guard by a couple of things.
For one, I didn’t realize how much of a kick I would get out of meeting the various friends and family of the bride and groom. I got to hear my buddy’s parents tell funny stories about him as a kid. I also got to tell his parents about how important their son’s mentorship was when we worked together. I love how weddings provide a venue for these conversations to happen because they wouldn’t really happen otherwise.
Before attending this wedding, I didn’t understand the idea of paying tens of thousands of dollars for an extraordinarily stressful event where you’re merging all these myriad friend groups and family trees together. It also seemed off to me that on a night that’s supposedly all about the bride and groom, it’s usually the guests who have the most fun. Who was the wedding even for?
Now, I see things a bit differently. In a way, each wedding guest is just a piece in the broader canvas of the celebrants’ lives, but for one night, everyone comes together to make a beautiful mosaic. In a world where everyone’s busy with work, family, and other things, weddings are a sacred space that forces everyone you care about to be together for just one night. These nights don’t happen very often.
As a matter of fact, there’s not going to be another night like it in your life until your own funeral procession, which tends to be a more dreary affair.
When I think about weddings this way, the stress of the event turns more into excitement. The anxiety associated with merging friend groups turns into eagerness at the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn strangers into friends. The hefty price tag of the wedding turns into the best thing money can buy: all your loved ones together in one place.
The other thing I learned about weddings is that you have to go to work shortly afterward.
It really is such a shame. I just spent Saturday night witnessing my friend and his now-wife exchange sacred vows in front of all their friends, family, and loved ones. And somehow, I now have to show up to work Monday morning, motivated to increase the bottom line.
But in a way, I guess that’s what makes weddings even more appealing. We work hundreds of days a year, often slogging through the workdays with our heads down. But weddings shift our attention away from laptops and towards what’s really important in this life: friendship, love, and a lively dance floor.