Weddings

I lost some friends recently. They didn’t die, they just stopped being my friends. I didn’t come to their wedding. When they first got engaged, they boasted that they hated traditional overblown and overpriced weddings and that theirs would be the opposite of that. Great, I thought. I can’t stand these obscenely expensive exercises in self-absorption for the bride and groom (really, mostly the bride) and their parents either. So I was looking forward to seeing what they would come up with.

Some time goes by, and I receive an e-mail telling me that they were selected by the Washington Post to be featured in an a wedding-themed issue. Theirs would be the anti-wedding. Interesting, I say, but don’t give it much thought. Eventually, an Evite arrives with the date and time, but no other information. I reply in the affirmative. Details begin to trickle in by e-mail. One of the messages says, attire: summer casual. I call to clarify. “Are you sure you want summer casual,” I ask, “to most people these days, that means shorts and flip-flops.” “We are absolutely sure,” comes the reply. Then the shoe drops. The wedding is going to be… a scavenger hunt. All guests show up at the bride and groom’s house in the morning, get introduced to their team mates, get handed Metro fare cards and are given hints on what to look for and photograph in this great city of ours. After a few hours of this, everyone meets back at the bride and groom’s house. I instantly recoil from the idea. My reaction is irrational at first. I just know that I will not participate in this, and not only because I find it a bit presumptuous to send people trekking all over DC by train and foot in heat and humidity of a late-June day. I call to say that J. and I would rather not participate in the scavenger hunt. The bride is instantly and deeply offended. “Is there still an opportunity to stop by afterwards and wish you guys a nice life?” I ask. “No,” she says.

Only later did I think about it enough to realize what it was that I found so repugnant about the idea. It reminded me of nothing so much as team-building exercises at company retreats, where you are forced to do things that make you uncomfortable with people you don’t know.

The wedding day came and went. J. and I sent a modest gift and enclosed a note to the effect that we hoped that it could serve as a token of our continuing friendship. We got a thank-you note in return, and even though in the note our friends said they were disappointed we weren’t there, I though there was hope. A few weeks later, I called. Clearly, their feeling have not changed. The gist of my friends’ opinion was that if I really couldn’t stomach the idea of participating, I should have told a white lie and said that something came up unexpectedly. “I didn’t want to be untruthful,” I said, “you know me well enough to know I hate lying no matter what the cause.” That because I made it clear that I simply didn’t want to participate, they felt judged. They felt that I was telling them that what they decided to do was somehow wrong. “Not wrong for you,” I insisted, “merely wrong for me.” It is amazing how many people take statements of individual opinion and preference personally. In fact, I would argue that everything anyone says is nothing but a personal opinion and should always be treated as such, but I digress. I was speaking, once again, to the bride, now wife, of the couple. She considered my reply for a moment and appeared to accept that I did not intend it as a personal affront, but clearly the bridge had been burned.

Perhaps, in retrospect, she was right. Perhaps it would have been a decent thing for me to do to tell a white lie and bow out without letting my feelings show. But what I could not fathom at the time was that participating in the scavenger hunt was the price of admission. I could not imagine that there wasn’t an opportunity to drop in at the reception later in the day, hug them, have a beer, and give them my best wishes. Isn’t it about sharing the special occasion in whatever capacity?

Turns out that there was much more to the day that I initially realized. I am not going to get into the details, because the Washington Post article has since been published, and you can read it here. After reading it, I was glad that I didn’t know everything from the beginning, for in all likelihood, it would have caused me to criticize the event even more. While the scavenger hunt in isolation was merely an unpleasant activity, the entire package came dangerously close in spirit to what my former friends set out to avoid – like a conventional white-gown-and-tiered-cake wedding, it was a circus. A lot less expensive, it’s true, and they deserve credit for that, but even while subverting what the article authors cleverly called the wedding-industrial complex, they managed to focus the attention unequivocally on themselves.