"My mother asks me why I care if people want to make fools of themselves, and why I can't just be nice and celebrate with my friends. The answer is because I'm expected to go along with this farce and play the Wedding Guest: dressing up, sitting through it all, congratulating them, and here's the main part spending serious money to buy them something from their registry list."
"The first was a couple who had gotten legally married weeks prior to the wedding so he could go on her health insurance. The second was an older couple who said they'd never had a real wedding. That made me think they hadn't really been married all along, but it turns out they had been; they just hadn't had the kind of event they'd wanted. The last one, which sent me over the brink, was our college friends."
"You are certainly right that people are now using the word wedding to refer to the party associated with the marriage ceremony, rather than as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, and dating from Old English the act of getting married. Thus the festivities you mention no doubt including the heroine's white dress and the pastry chef's white iced cake are considered to be the weddings."
Three examples illustrate couples holding celebratory 'weddings' after legal marriage: one married legally for health insurance, one already-married older couple seeking a proper event, and friends repeating ceremonies across cities to spare guests travel. Guests face expectations to dress up, attend, offer congratulations, and spend significant money on registry gifts, sometimes multiple times for pre-wedding (post-marriage) parties. Some guests resent being required to play the Wedding Guest and to incur those costs for what they view as a farce. The term 'wedding' increasingly denotes the party rather than the legal act of getting married, and guests often overlook that separation.
Read at www.mercurynews.com
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