Those of us who miss billboards often need certain memos delivered to us in a handwritten envelope. Therein lies the job of the wedding invitation. To be a single person—male or female, I daresay—whose usual stack of bills, junk mail, and never-to-be-read issues of Esquire magazine suddenly includes a wedding invitation is to stare at your life as though the measure of your choices, failings, uncertainties, delusions, hopes, and, on some level, downright laziness is being spelled out in black ink. To be extremely single (as in the haven't-bothered-to-shave-legs-in-months variety) and receive a wedding invitation is to begin making mental preparations for the invariable purgatory of the “singles' table.” To be moderately single (as in the dating-someone-who-calls-regularly-but-knows-neither-your-birthday-nor-your-mother's-first-name variety) is to enter into a form of self-doubt so intense and all-consuming that it's possible to feel nostalgic for the arid refuge of extreme singleness. If showing up to a wedding sans date is a small act of courage, showing up at a wedding in the form of a couple that's not sure it's a couple is a monumental act of… something. Only time—and maybe psy-chotherapy—will tell for sure. In any case it won't obviate the task of calling up the bride or groom and asking what feels a lot like permission to bring a guest.
The wedding hosts have, of course, every right to exercise jurisprudence over who will be consuming the food and drink that is costing them and/or their parents upward of $200 per head. And even when money isn't the issue (we all know a few of these people; they tend to own handbag boutiques in trendy urban neighborhoods), you can hardly blame someone for not wanting to share what is supposed to be the most sacred moment of their lives with strangers their friends met on Match.com. But this is the first crack in the inevitable fissure between single people and married people, a gulf that, despite the best efforts of both parties, will grow wider with each phone call not immediately returned, every Saturday-night plan rescheduled for a Monday, and every relationship crisis that neither friend, no matter how many romantic catastrophes they've seen each other through, will ever again fully understand.
In all cases, the single person will be the first to take notice of this phenomenon. That's because the married or about-to-be-married person will go through a long period of not noticing anything other than the color of her beloved's eyes and whether they match the place mats for which she registered at Pottery Barn. This is natural and at least temporarily excusable, the main problem being the ensuing confusion when a friend asks if it's okay to bring a semi-significant other to the wedding. For some brides, and even the occasional groom, the myopia of the relationship and its attendant party planning has made them unaware that the friend even has a new “other,” be it significant, semi-significant, or just short of a houseplant. This, exacerbated by the tendency of unequivocally serious relationships to erase all memory of what it was like to be in the far more common “ambiguously defined relationships,” makes the single person about as excited about the wedding as she is about an annual gynecological exam. Hence the inclination to put off calling for an appointment as long as possible.
SOON-TO-BE-MARRIED: Why haven't you RSVP'd yet?
PERSON IN AMBIGUOUSLY DEFINED RELATIONSHIP: I've been meaning to talk to you about that.
SOON-TO-BE: There are going to be lots of single people there, if that's what you're worried about.
AMBIGUOUS: Well, I've actually been seeing someone for a few months and I—
SOON-TO-BE: Who, that guy Joel?
AMBIGUOUS: No, this guy Will.
SOON-TO-BE: What happened to Joel?
AMBIGUOUS: Oh, you know…
SOON-TO-BE: Well, how serious is it?
AMBIGUOUS: I don't know. But it just seems weird to not, you know, bring him….
SOON-TO-BE: There are going to be single men there. At least one, anyway. Probably.
AMBIGUOUS: We're not really seeing other people. SOON-TO-BE: But you haven't even met this Bill!
Et cetera.
The confluence of the ambiguously defined relationship and the arrival of a wedding invitation is the defining drawback of being single. As cumbersome as holidays, parental visits, and company picnics can be for the not-quite couple (“this is my, uh, friend …”), weddings are a game of sudden death. By the time the band packs up, your relationship will have either turned the corner into a sweet, fierce intimacy or you will be breaking up in the car. Such is the tyranny of the power of suggestion. By so publicly raising their own stakes, the marrying couple inadvertently drags everyone else into their drama. Like a toddler whose pristine world is rocked to the nub when he hears a four-letter word on premium cable, the ambiguously defined couple can only squirm in their church pew as the protective bubble wrap of their oh-so-casual rapport is punctured with “I do”s and “till death do us part”s. Gone are the semiprivate jokes and references to American Idol that, in the past, glued the relationship together like a toy plane. Once a couple has attended a wedding, even the most affectionate form of banter won't cut it anymore. Try as you might to cast them aside, the echoes of those vows will reduce all other conversation to small talk. Like the turning of the seasons, the tint of every interaction will darken a shade or two, leaving you with a form of seasonal affective disorder that will feel like a venereal disease. Without warning, you become terribly alarmed about the other person's taste in sofas. Suddenly you must know where they really stand on Israel. At the very least, you need to learn their mother's first name. For all but the fortunate few, these questions will vacuum whatever fun in the relationship hasn't already been squelched by the wedding itself. It is at this point that you realize you are no longer in a relationship. You are in an expectationship. Plus you've shelled out a hundred dollars for a Pottery Barn gift.
Is it any surprise, then, that going stag to a wedding remains, if not necessarily an “attractive” option, a perfectly legitimate mode of self-preservation? Actually, yes. No matter how often people say, “Weddings are a great place to meet someone,” the less repeated part of that sentence is “who will talk your ear off about annuities” (or, as I've experienced in the last three years alone, gastroenterology, horsemanship, and what a slut the bride was in college). No matter how many times the hard-partying folks at the singles' table declare, “This is the fun table!” when a visitor from Grown-up Land ventures over for a look-see, the implicit understanding is that the singles' table is essentially a kids' table with booze.
In the case of destination weddings, the kind that require airfare and taking days off from work, the singles' table extends into a kind of camping trip. These are the weddings where, unless you happen to be very old, close friends with a significant number of other single guests (think The Big Chill, minus the suicide), there is no surviving the situation unless you a) have a date and b) are having sex with that person on a regular basis.
Such were my circumstances almost a decade ago, when, having been summoned to Maine for an exquisite wedding for which the couple was paying everyone's accommodations (it was the dot-com nineties; they'd also hired a famous blues singer to perform under a tent), I sheepishly asked my ambiguously defined boyfriend to accompany me. Let me say right off that as far as ambiguously defined relationships go, this one was in an upper tier. We'd fallen for each other hard and fast, our mutual attraction (he looked just like the actor David Duchovny) and obsession with the films of Jim Jarmusch overriding our countless incompatibilities. After a less-than-cushy but not entirely awkward amount of time—we began dating in April; the wedding invitation arrived in June—I popped the question, an inquiry that in lesser hands might have emitted the sound of a vise grip closing in on a piece of lumber. But thanks to my already vast experience with ambiguously defined relationships, I inquired with such nonchalance as if I were asking nothing at all, which is in fact how the question was received.
ME: So, remember I mentioned my friends T ——— and W ———, who are getting married?
AMBIGUOUS BOYFRIEND: Uh, I guess.
ME: Their we
dding is coming up. It's over Labor Day weekend. It should be fun.
AMBIGUOUS BF: Uh-huh.
ME: You're welcome to come with me if you want. You don't have to, though.
AMBIGUOUS BF: Oh.
ME: Do you want to?
AMBIGUOUS BF: Yeah, I guess.
ME: But only if you want to.
AMBIGUOUS BF: Yeah, I want to!
ME: Are you sure? Because you don't have to. We'd have to fly there. But I'd pay for your ticket.
AMBIGUOUS BF: It sounds fun.
ME: You really don't have to.
AMBIGUOUS BF: I want to!
He'd said yes! Twice, no less (and with feeling—I did not add that exclamation point for emphasis; it was right there in his voice). Gleeful with my ambiguously-defined-boyfriend-isn't-so-ambiguous-that-he-can't-accompany-me-to-a-wedding smugness, I RSVP'd for both of us, purchased two tickets on US Air Express, and proceeded over the ensuing six weeks to lose exactly as much interest in him as he lost in me, which is to say all of it. Suddenly, the flaws I'd initially seen as youthful quirks—his perpetual cheapness, his compulsive quoting of lines from The Simpsons, the fact that he was still living in his ex-girlfriend's apartment (she was no longer there, but all of her Williams-Sonoma cookware was, which is why I'd tolerated it)—started to seem like punishable crimes. As Labor Day weekend approached, it was clear to both of us that our relationship was trailing off like summer itself. The problem was the wedding. Ever the pragmatist, I planned to take him to the wedding, enjoy a final weekend of drunken celebration among strangers who'd surely be impressed that I'd landed a David Duchovny look-alike, and commence with an amicable breakup as soon as the wheels touched the tarmac at home.
But two days before we were scheduled to leave for Maine, the Ambiguous BF showed up at my apartment carrying the VCR I'd lent him some months earlier. Bad sign. We sat on opposite sides of the room and talked about the shocking news about Princess Diana, who'd died the day before. He told me that we'd had a wonderful ride together but were probably better off as friends. I wholeheartedly agreed, adding that friends sometimes accompany friends to weddings, so I hoped he was still game. He said he didn't think he could do it. Then he started weeping. I went over to comfort him, wrapping my arms around him and telling him it was for the best, that we'd still spend time together, that in a week we'd feel so much better. He began sputtering and gasping. “She was so young,” he heaved. “Such an icon. And poor Prince William and Prince Harry, losing their mother like that.”
Any chance that I was going to cry during this conversation vanished immediately. The conversation wherein I had to track down the bride at the hotel in Maine and tell her she had to redo the lodging and seating plans was another matter.
BRIDE: What happened?
ME: Well, you know. It just didn't work out.
BRIDE: How long were you guys going out anyway?
ME: I don't know, four months?
BRIDE: Oh, then you shouldn't be too upset. We had you guys staying in a suite with three other couples. You don't mind if we keep you in there, do you?
As it turned out, this ended up being one of the best weddings I've ever attended. The location was gorgeous, the rehearsal dinner was a lobster bake by the ocean cliffs, the blues singer was terrific, and the couples in my “couples suite” either got so drunk they couldn't walk or bickered for forty-eight hours straight about who forgot to pack the toothpaste. I didn't cry during the ceremony (it would be at least six years before I started crying at weddings), nor did I cry while lying alone in the double bed listening to the slurred whispers of my bed-sharing suitemates and thinking about the $200 I'd spent on the Ambiguous BF's unused plane ticket. Instead, I soldiered through the weekend, avoided throwing up, and returned home feeling empowered and even a little glad that the Ambiguous BF (emeritus) hadn't come. I then began sorting through my mail and discovered yet another wedding invitation. Gazing absently around my apartment, I caught sight of my newly returned VCR, not yet hooked back up, and burst into tears.
The funny thing about weddings is the way they capture the fantasies of the hosts and guests alike. For all the brides and potential brides who have dreamed about what kind of formal affair best expresses their personal and aesthetic values, there are even more of us who wonder when and where we'll find the person who will accompany us to our friends' and relatives' weddings, hold our hand during the ceremony, dance with us during the reception, and spend the car ride home not breaking up but gossiping about the other guests while Garrison Keillor drones softly on the radio. For some of us (okay, me, at least) this is a scenario that remains firmly in the fantasy category, because most of the men I've dated either couldn't dance or never really got the hang of post–social event analysis. If the worst part of going to a wedding with an ambiguously defined date is the pressure cooker into which it deposits the relationship, the worst part about going alone is that there's no one to talk to afterward about why the best man felt compelled to give his toast using a PowerPoint presentation. At the same time, if there's anything more exhausting than the hard labor of smiling and initiating conversations and figuring out where to position yourself on the dance floor without the ballast of a partner, it's hearing your friends take the most solemn vows of their lives, feeling the warm body of the person next to you, and knowing not only that you will never love that person enough to say those vows yourself, but that given the way the whole thing is going—so often a replay of the replay of the very first time love abandoned its post—you might never be able to say them to anyone.
I remember the first wedding I ever went to as a quasi grown-up. The friends weren't mine; they were old family friends of a boyfriend who had started out as ambiguously defined as they come but who, at some indiscernible point, had fallen in love with me to a degree of desperation that scared me to death. We were young; he was twenty and I was twenty-one, and we drove from New York City, where he lived and where I'd spent the last year, to New Hampshire in my rusty Honda like a pair of runaways. We were out of our depth. I should have been back in school upstate. He hadn't thought to pack proper shoes, which he didn't own anyway. We weren't familiar with the protocol of ceremony seating, so we sat on the bride's side of the church even though he knew the groom better. This was a tiny, sparse, perfect chapel and the reception was on a large, sparse, perfect farm. We sat in the sun and drank champagne. The guests were kind, quiet, Anglican types—the bride and groom had met in seminary school—and we managed to hold up our ends of the conversation, which was something this boyfriend had rarely managed to do in the year and a half that I'd known him.
That night we checked into a Motel 6. We were playing grown-up. Even with our cigarettes and tattered copies of Vonnegut novels, we thought we'd transcended the limitations of our youth. We thought we'd come into ourselves. We lay in bed and he gripped me as though I were falling off a cliff. “I love you,' he said. “There is no one I love more on earth. There is no one I will ever love more than this girl right here.”
Tears erupted from me like sickness. Wrenching, miserable, uncontrollable tears. I gagged on them. They cut off my air supply. They ruined the world. I did not love this man, this boy, whatever he was. I hated him for loving me and hated myself for having allowed him to. This relationship took place during a weird, hard period in both of our lives. We both had families in chaos, the city assaulted us daily, and of course there was the standard nonsense that comes from being twenty and twenty-one years old. We had a closeness that was both magical and suffocating. When we were together, which was most of the time, it was like we were sharing each other's organs. But I did not love him, at least not enough or in the right way. And that night at Motel 6, as the air conditioner buzzed and the air stank of carpet cleaner and smoke, I cried as hard as I'd cry over anything for years to come. I cried because I would soon hurt him more than he could ever hurt me. I cried because I feared then that I didn't have it in me to love someone enough to really be hurt, that I'd somehow dam
aged myself beyond all capacity to ever do something like stand up in a tiny, perfect church and do what people do to supposedly set their lives in motion.
Of course, twenty-one-year-old girls like to come up with dramatic, existential reasons for needing to unload their brooding, chain-smoking twenty-year-old boyfriends. Fifteen years hence, there have been several more brooders, a handful of unnervingly buoyant free spirits, and more wedding invitations than all of the boyfriends—ambiguous and not—put together. I'm a member of that demographic that marries late—last year alone, four friends over thirty-six got married for the first time—and that means that even though I was spared the onslaught in my mid-twenties that my mother warned me about, the invitations tend to arrive in the kind of steady trickle that keeps me up at night wondering if I'll ever find someone to fix the faucet.
But I still go to as many weddings as I can, and I'm proud to say that although much of the righteousness of my twenties has mellowed, I still harbor no jealousy of my friends who get married. I'd like to say that's because I know they'll owe me big-time when my turn comes, that I'll earn back all those gifts and expensive plane tickets when I decide to register at Bergdorf 's and get married in Tuscany. But the truth is that, for me, the words “wedding” and “fantasy” have never quite fit together. To say I wouldn't have preferences regarding my own wedding if it were ever to occur would be overstating my (already significant) powers of indifference. But to elevate the wedding—even the distant notion of a wedding—to a landmark event that draws a line in the sand between then and now would be to forget that night in Motel 6. Real love, we all know, can hurt like hell. But love that's not quite real can choke the life out of you. That's why I still believe it's worth it to wait for the real thing, even if it means getting sick in a bathroom at the Helmsley Palace, even if it means—and I'll say it out loud—that it never comes at all. You may be alone, but you'll still be alive.
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