I don't

I find myself surrounded by women planning their weddings; women incessantly leafing through wedding industry magazines and discussing such details as the color of the flowers (satin orange, vanilla cream, lilac dream), the color of their dresses (white, champagne, ivory), the date (two years from now, but the date is already set), their budget (in the tens of thousands (and these are not wealthy women by any means)).

This is not going to be a rant by an unmarried woman jealous of their fairytale parties and flurry of meticulous planning. This is going to be a rhetorical, inquisitive, rechauffe by a jaded lady with limited experience in these desires and the finite quest to fulfill them. These ladies make me worried that I am not enough concerned about my conjugal future, or at least its initiation ceremony, and so, I am trying to make amends to my disinterest.

About a year ago I was looking for photo assisting jobs with Philly's somewhat quantitatively lacking, hiring photographers. I came upon a website where a wedding photographer wrote to his excitable clientele the following, indirectly quoted, entreaty: Your wedding day is going to be the best and most memorable of your marriage. It won't be as good from hence forth, so hire the best and you can at least remember the good times by leafing through your wedding photo album. (I'm not rewording in order to exaggerate, rather, because I can't find the website.)

Was the gentleman's depressing sales pitch telling it how it is? Is the wedding day the lead zeppelin of a convivial future, gleaming so pretty in the sky for that one moment only to fall to the dull ground? Does it set a tone? They're not exactly maidens dressed in their ivory gowns, dancing pretty before succumbing to the dirty fate of womanhood, the couples meeting each other for the first time and having their inaugural quivering in bed at the end of the festivities. Chances are, they already live together, know each others' families, how to make each other cum fast and slow, and how they like their pants folded. Chances are, they'll fight planning it. What is the big deal?

If I get married one day, I'll probably have a party. It will be in someone's backyard and I'll likely have more kegs than flower arrangements. If friends and parents shower us with money on that fine day, we will probably take it and fly far, to not return for some time. It seems silly, to me, to spend so much on a party to then not be able to afford an extra two days on the honeymoon, making it a full week (a week!), like someone at my work just did. This, however, is not the point.

The point is, weddings are rampant. Lasting marriages, not so much. In putting all of one's hopes, dreams, and efforts into a ceremony, are they also investing in their relationship? Who is the showiness and formality for? What is it that they really get out of it? I'm also curious, what's the morning after the party like? Some of these productions seem too unreal to even have a morning [ever] after.

West Virginia - Dolly Sods

Dolly [after the German Dahle family, who farmed the land and used it for their sheep to graze upon] Sod [1. a section cut or torn from the surface of grassland, containing the matted roots of grass. 2. the surface of the ground, esp. when covered with grass; turf; sward. 3. sodomite; homosexual. 4. chap; fellow; guy. 5. child; kid; brat. 6. to damn: Sod the bloody bastard! ]

The sun sat upon the red leaves of the huckleberries in a rather unspectacular manner, except when it hit them at the right angle, when it shone through them as if they were thin, veinous membranes, alighting them in a lambent red glow that spread over entire fields. One couple was unimpressed; they drove up to the lookout, remarked that 'there wasn't even anything to take a picture of,' and drove back down in their miserable car. Well, sod them! There was plenty to take a picture of and plenty more to revel in without pictures. There was a ubiquitous, lithe silence, crisp mornings in a soggy tent, raging camp fires that in shyly bewildering winds threatened to besiege whole, blond fields, forest floors covered in key lime colored ferns, and fields, fields littered with trees and covered by wind-swept grasses, all poised in an undomineering quietude...

Morn-

Face