by Karo, Aaron
WHY WE’RE GATHERED HERE
I like the little program you get when you arrive for the wedding ceremony. I immediately search for the list of bridesmaids. For single guys, this is our first look at the menu for the evening. Sometimes, it lists the bride’s relationship with each bridesmaid. And while the backstory is appreciated, all I’d really like to know is if she has a boyfriend and what my odds are of sealing the deal in the next, say, five hours. I was at a wedding once where two of my friends—who didn’t know each other beforehand—ended up hooking up. Later, the girl asked me if it was weird that the guy tried to sleep with her. Dumbfounded, I replied, “It’d be weird if he didn’t try to sleep with you.”
The fact is, every guest at a wedding who is invited without a “plus one” is in search of an elusive and mythical bounty: wedding ass. As the thinking goes, combining lonely single people with an open bar at an event celebrating love should equal rash decision-making and no pants for everyone. But of course the theory that it’s easy to get laid at weddings only holds true if there are actually available girls there. As I get older, each wedding I attend seems to have a smaller population of eligible bachelorettes. And you know the pickings are slim when even the singles table has fucking couples at it!
But that doesn’t mean the marriage of a man and woman who love each other doesn’t ever lead to premarital sex between a man and woman who barely know each other. I’ve done my share of damage, including two wedding weekends where I hooked up with two girls apiece. The first night is much easier, since guests are getting into town from all over the country and are eager to meet new people and party without inhibition. The actual wedding is a bit harder for me, usually because I have to spend at least until the cocktail hour avoiding the chick from the night before.
My primary target will always be the bridesmaids. Since the groom knows them, I’m able to gather better pre-wedding intelligence and, if I’m a groomsmen, jockey to get paired with the hottest single one when walking down the aisle. Plus, if one accepts that loneliness contributes to easiness, then surely the closer a woman is to the bride, the more desperate she becomes. Unfortunately, due to our large, still intact crew from high school, at Brian’s ceremony the groomsmen outnumbered the bridesmaids by about three to one. So not only were there not enough chicks to go around, but as Best Man I had to walk down the aisle by myself like a lost drum major in a marching band.
THE BIG DAY
I was rushing to get ready for my high school buddy Seth’s wedding when I realized the dry cleaner had given me back someone else’s tux pants and they were five sizes too big for me. Since I was at my parents’ house on Long Island, I didn’t have any backups and had to cobble together a makeshift outfit from half a tux and half an outdated, unflattering suit from college. Only later did I discover the dry cleaner had accidentally switched my tux pants with my dad’s, and mine were hanging in his closet in the next room. Which would have been funny had I not just spent the whole night looking like some kind of black-tie hobo.
Everyone says the big day is all about the bride. It’s her time to shine. And thank God, because if weddings were focused on the groom they’d be twice as painful. Grooms always look so fucking awkward during all stages of a wedding—from the time they walk down the aisle right until the last dance. They’re stiff, they’re nervous, they look like they’re about to faint. Sometimes when I’m sitting in the back of the ceremony with the rest of the degenerates who rolled in late, I just want to walk up to the groom, sit his sweating, anxious ass down, and take his place. Not because I’m desperate to get married of course; I just love being the center of attention.
After the ceremony and approximately six minutes into the cocktail hour of any wedding, I always have the same panicked thought: “There aren’t enough bartenders.” Seriously, if you can hire someone whose sole function is to make sure the bride’s train doesn’t touch the ground when she walks down the aisle, you can have someone serve me a fucking Goose on the rocks without making me wait more than a millisecond.
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GLOSSARY
FREDDING
A wedding where many of the guests are frat brothers of the groom. Freddings often involve a lot more drinking and the occasional tuxedo-clad human pyramid. Brides, if your fiancé has worn an article of clothing with his fraternity’s letters on it in the past thirty days, you’re most likely having a fredding. Prepare for possible streaking.
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Christina got legally married at city hall six months before her actual wedding, in order to exploit some loophole that allowed her and her husband—both doctors—to get placed in jobs in the same city. I thought the wedding weekend would be a little anticlimactic, but I was pleasantly surprised to get just as belligerently wasted as usual. The first night was the drunken clambake toast disaster, and the morning after the actual wedding I woke up outside in a hammock. The final tally? Bridesmaids taken down: two; tuxes ruined by hammock: one; memories I’ll cherish forever of one of my oldest childhood friends getting married: zero.
During the reception, the bride and groom are like celebrities to me. They’re the stars of the show, but they’re mostly surrounded by their best friends, like a little VIP section. If you’re not a VIP, you actually have to observe and plan out when there’s an opening for you to go up and talk to them—as if you were looking for an autograph. Then you chat for like two minutes just to make sure they’re aware that you did in fact attend, but you know they won’t even remember it. Basically, the only difference between the groom and Justin Timberlake is that JT didn’t spend the summer taking lame-ass ballroom dancing lessons.
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WORDS OF WISDOM
“He who misses bachelor party gets twice as drunk at wedding.”
—Ancient proverb I just made up
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My move to Los Angeles coincided directly with the first wave of my friends getting married. Thus, since leaving New York I’ve played one of the most underappreciated roles at every wedding I’ve attended: the out-of-town guest. The simple truth is that flying in for a wedding is a huge pain in the ass. It’s annoying, expensive, and forces you to make sacrifices (for example, having to choose the wedding over the bachelor party). But I soldier on anyway. Why? Because I enjoy celebrating with my friends. I want to be in attendance on the most important day of their lives. And I like making toasts (sometimes unsolicited and often laced with expletives). All I really ask of the happy couple is that they recognize the contribution that single dudes make to their wedding. Seat us next to the hottest available chick. Thank us for spending three hours on Kayak.com looking for a decent flight. Use our crystal serving thingamabob. But most of all, hire another fucking bartender.
POST-NUP
Hanging out with married people my own age is really strange. You know, because they’re married and I’m still human. Guys who are about to get married are very fond of telling their boys that “nothing is gonna change; we’re still gonna hang out.” Trust me, everything changes. I remember talking to one of my buddies a few weeks after his honeymoon and saying, “Dude, all the boys are getting together. We’re going on a mancation. We’re going to fucking Mardi Gras. Are you in?” And my buddy was like, “I’m definitely in. Let me just ask my wife.” I said, “You know what? Offer rescinded. Rescinded! There will be no permission-asking on this mancation. You ruined it.”
Some guys become completely helpless once they get married, not so much because they ask permission from their wives, but because they rely on them to script their every move. I was hanging out with a female friend of mine, and her husband kept texting her, asking her what she was doing and complaining about being bored. His wife actually had to suggest that he make plans with friends and even offered to call them herself. So basically she was setting up a playdate. Seriously, dude? What did you do when you were single? Just do that, except don’t have sex with anyone but your wife!
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GLOSSARY
&nb
sp; RCFs
Engaged and married people often hang out with RCFs—random couple friends. These are the groups of couples you’ve never seen before that all of a sudden occupy all of your buddy’s time. Where the fuck did these people come from? When a man gets down on one knee does some high-pitched whistle sound that only boring couples can hear?
Many of the issues I have with married people stem from the fact that they only hang out with other couples. It’s two by two by two by two—like a fucking Noah’s Ark of boring dudes wearing loafers and chicks who own fondue pots. When couples congregate they start to get weird, crazy ideas that no single (read: sane) person would go along with. No, I don’t want to go to your friend’s wife’s wine-tasting dinner party! I don’t even know what merlot is!
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Since serving in Brian’s wedding party, my responsibilities as his Best Man have continued. Last year, he and Blake had to go to separate weddings on the same day. I happened to be going to the one that Blake was going to, so I essentially served as her “date” for the evening—sitting next to her and getting her champagne and generally looking out for her. She promptly got hammered, spilled a drink into her purse, and had to throw rocks at Brian’s window when she locked herself out at the end of the night. Mission accomplished.
HUSBAND AND WIFE
The turnout for my ten-year high school reunion was surprisingly high. A few people got inappropriately shitfaced, but the highlight for me was running into my first girlfriend from middle school and meeting her fiancé. After all, when we dated for about a week circa 1991, who would have thought that, so many years later, one of us would be embarking on an amazing phase of life filled with thrills and new adventures—and the other would be getting married.
About a year and a half prior to my ten-year high school reunion, I attended my five-year college reunion. During the festivities, I wandered into a tent for those who graduated in the ’80s, and noticed an unusual number of super hot chicks—which was surprising, because that’s not exactly what Penn is known for. Then I realized that none of the name tags that the really hot women were wearing listed a graduation year. And that’s when it hit me: these were actually the alumni’s wives. Apparently, the Latin on my diploma reads, “Bachelor of Science in Economics with a minor in Marrying Well.”
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OBSERVATION
Dear Future Wife: The most important job you will ever have is to kill spiders for me.
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If I could make but one desperate plea to married people, it would be this: Please do not get a joint email address with your wife. Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you? Grow a pair and keep your own email address. It’s not like sharing a car; it’s free! There’s no reason I should ever get an email and be confused about whether it’s coming from my buddy or his wife: “Hey Karo, let’s get fucked up tonight, you asshole! Warm regards, Kristin and Jonathan.”
As I’ve already mentioned, I believe married people should not be allowed in bars. On top of the issue of forcing guys to look for rings on the fingers of girls they’re kicking game to, married people are simply taking up valuable real estate. Engaged people aren’t exempt either; what are you doing here anyway? Go home and pick out place cards or some shit. I don’t even think married people should be allowed on Facebook, let alone in bars. If I ever see in my news feed that Jane Smith went from In a Relationship to Married, the next line better be: “Jane Smith has deleted her profile.”
PREGNANT PAUSE
Just as I began to make peace with the fact that all my friends were leaving me behind by getting married, they took things to a whole new level and started popping out babies. I’m convinced that everyone’s doing it just to placate their parents. My mom has never put any explicit pressure on me to get married and have her grandkids, but I can tell by her tone of voice that she’d appreciate it if I’d at least try. Whenever I mention the fact that I’m nowhere close to being ready, she just gives me the look—that look that says, “I raised you and put up with all your bullshit and you can’t do this one lousy fucking thing for me?” Nobody likes that mom look. It just makes me feel bad about everything I’ve ever done in my entire life. But not quite guilty enough to actually do anything about it.
An executive I’ve worked with in LA recently had her first kid. Every time we see each other now, she has this glow about her that comes with being a new mother. Single guys, of course, have the opposite feeling. Any morning we wake up and don’t have any children is a cause for celebration. I had a pregnancy scare once. A girl I was dating came over to my place and said, “I’m late.” Confused, I looked at my watch and said, “Actually, you’re early.” Two hours later I was trying to decipher the cryptic results of a pee-soaked stick. It was negative. I breathed a sigh of relief. After all, the pregnancy test alone cost $21.99.
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FALSE ALARM
My second pregnancy scare occurred when someone told me my college girlfriend just had a kid. I was like, “Oh shit, I slept with her nine…wait, nine years ago. Not months. OK, phew, that was close.”
* * *
Gadi, my Israeli friend, just married a chick with an eight-year-old son. His wife is gourmet and Gadi and the kid get along great. Still, I don’t think I could ever date a girl with a kid. I mean, if a relationship is gonna have an immature whiner who vomits without warning, it’s gonna be me. Let’s face it: I won’t even date a girl who lives more than a quarter mile away from me. I won’t date a Red Sox fan, a smoker, someone who doesn’t watch Lost, or someone who doesn’t drink. Hell, I won’t even date a girl with a roommate, let alone one who sleeps in a fucking crib.
NINE LONG MONTHS
The weird thing is, I’ve started to feel sympathy pains when my friends are pregnant. Though when I say “sympathy,” I mean I feel bad for myself for having to endure such nonsense. Listening to my pregnant friends update me on the status of their unborn children is just torture. How long will it be until someone just says fuck it and creates a Facebook page for their fetus? Sonogram for a profile picture. Favorite movie: Look Who’s Talking. Interests: Mitosis. Birthday: Hopefully soon.
Even if you’re single, being pregnant takes you out of the dating pool. You’re not even eligible for consideration. I once called my gym to schedule a massage and the receptionist offered me a choice of three female masseuses. I half-jokingly asked her which one was the cutest, and she replied, “Definitely Amber.” When I showed up a week later, I saw that Amber was pregnant. Very pregnant. Like eleven months pregnant. Either the receptionist was fucking with me, or she didn’t realize that pregnant by definition means “not cute.”
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ETHICAL DILEMMA
Shermdog was on a crowded, rush-hour subway in New York when a pregnant woman waddled onto the train. As soon as he got off, Shermdog called and asked me if I thought it was wrong of him not to give up his seat for her. I said that I wouldn’t necessarily classify that as “wrong” but that it would have been the polite thing to do. Then he added that, at the time of the incident, he had been wearing his scrubs and hospital ID. I responded that, well, in that case it may have been wrong. Then I asked, “What were you thinking?” To which Shermdog replied, “That she was hot and I kinda wanted to fuck her.” Yeah, definitely wrong.
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How come babies are never born in the afternoon? Every time I hear that someone had a kid, it’s always at like four in the morning. I mean, I was born at 8:10 a.m. and I haven’t gotten up that early since. Seth is the first of my high school friends to have a kid. His son, Logan, was born at close to midnight, which is at least a little more reasonable. It’s really weird to think about how old Logan will be by the time I actually have kids myself. I really look at each of my friend’s newborns as a potential babysitter.
OH BABY
The only thing worse than getting updates on my friends’ unborn children is getting updates on their born children. My old boss on Wall Street used to tell me that his dau
ghter would always get into this jar of candy they kept in the kitchen, so he finally put it on top of the fridge where she couldn’t get to it. However, when he and his wife weren’t watching, the daughter peeled off the bath mat from the tub, brought it into the kitchen, and pulled all the drawers out of one of the cabinets, creating makeshift steps to climb onto the counter. Then she used the bath mat as traction to climb onto a small shelf, and from there she jumped on top of the fridge and got to the candy jar. The whole time I was thinking, “That’s not a three-year-old, that’s a velociraptor.”
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AMBITIOUS IDEAS
I propose a pact: celebrities are not allowed to give their babies stupid names if the National Weather Service is not allowed to give hurricanes even dumber ones.
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Because I’ve been writing my Ruminations column since my freshman year of college, my fans and I have literally grown up together. I share momentous events in my life—graduating from college, moving to Los Angeles—with my readers, and they do the same in their emails to me. Earlier this year, a longtime fan wrote me to say that she’d recently taken to reading my column while breast-feeding. Ugh. I thought I’d at least be turned on that somewhere out there a chick is enjoying my work with her tits exposed. Instead I couldn’t drink milk for a week.