I can't recall ever crying at a wedding.
I can recall being hungry at more than one wedding. I've been drunk, happy, bored, annoyed, joyful, and preoccupied by the Spanx cutting off my circulation.
With the Spanx thing, my brain always invents a minor medical Spanx emergency that would get me out of there and to a place where I can snooze in a hospital bed and be delivered snacks by kind nurses. Or undergo scary tests, I guess, but either way, I wouldn't have to make inane small talk with anyone.
Nope, I don't hate weddings. I just hate when people make them out to be a Fairytale Happily Ever After that all little girls should grow up dreaming about.
Little (and big) girls should dream about how to make themselves happy, right? Right. Just ask Taylor Swift about how a Happy Ending allegedly affected her Happily Ever After.
What if the wedding was genuinely fake? Not fake like, I know these two will never last because he's clearly into guys and she's clearly into the best man and they're just doing this to make their families happy and they won't make it past the three-year mark?
But fake like it's a big, fake wedding with a (fake) ceremony, 600 (real) guests, a catered dinner, dancing, drinks until 6 a.m.
The couple is just acting out the motions (for actual real — not like Kardashian real) and the officiant is an actor, not a priest.
The wedding is a bit of a skit for the paying audience because in wedding-starved Argentinian society, parties like these are all the rage.
"With fewer and fewer young Argentinians getting married for real, groups of friends in their 20s and 30s are instead paying around $50 each to attend staged events," according to The Guardian.
The story uses statistics to back up the perception that fewer couples are getting married in Argentina: "only 11,642 couples got married in Buenos Aires in 2013, down from nearly 22,000 in 1990."
Everyone loves a good party, right? With fewer real weddings to attend, a group of friends decided to host fake weddings as a way to give people what they want — a fun, catered affair where they can dance the night away.
There is drama to these events, of course. The Guardian describes one scene in which the bride and groom are set to recite their vows when the groom's boyfriend stands and professes his undying love. The bride runs off in tears and the groom and his boyfriend get married instead. Everyone parties.
It makes good sense to have a wedding that is all party and scripted drama, minus the gifts and other bridesmaid/shower/bachelorette nonsense. (I suppose Spanx is still optional.)
In the description of the fake bride walking down the fake aisle, this is the part that got me: "As she makes her way down the aisle, some guests — overcome with emotion — dab tears from their eyes."
It's a fake wedding. Why are they crying? Why does anyone (other than the parents of the couple getting married) cry at a wedding?
Please don't tell me because the bride is so beautiful or because you're so overcome with emotion at the beauty of the ceremony or the union of these two people or whatever.
If you cry at a fake wedding, you're a crier. Then non-criers like me are accused of having no soul. I mean, come on. I can be happy for them. Crying is unnecessary.
Show me a video of a cheetah cub and puppy playing together and I get all weepy. But that's entirely a different thing.
