grant-writing gigs and started “helping” rich kids with their college application essays, which effectively meant writing them. Propping up the class system paid terrifically, and with this ill-gotten cash, I bought myself a sense of permission. I wrote some short stories and got into Michigan’s MFA program. In 2012, we moved to Ann Arbor. We were invited to eighteen weddings over the course of the next year.
By that point Andrew and I were a team, fully. We had a dog, we split the housework and our credit card statement, and we had never spent a holiday apart. When I curled up to him in the mornings I felt like a baby sea lion climbing on a sunlit rock. One weekend in 2013 we flew back to Texas for a wedding in Marfa, where the whole thing was a vision of heaven: a mournful Led Zeppelin riff thrumming through a church, the heat of the desert, the supernatural happiness of the young couple, the sunset gradient fading away as they danced. That night I sat under the stars in a black dress, drinking tequila, wondering if my heart was as incorrect as it seemed to me in that moment—thudding with the certainty that I didn’t want any of this at all.
The pressure of this thought intensified until my ears seemed to be ringing. I told Andrew what I was thinking, and his face crumpled. He had been thinking the exact opposite, he told me. This was the first wedding where he’d really understood what all of this was for.
* * *
—
Half a decade has gone by since then. Andrew has long ago forgiven me for making him cry in Marfa; he has also, possibly due to a lack of desirable alternatives, lost interest in making anything official. Our lives are full of pleasure but almost completely stripped of mass ritual: we don’t do anything for Valentine’s Day, or celebrate an “anniversary,” or give each other Christmas presents, or put up a tree. For my part, I have stopped feeling guilty about not wanting to marry such a marriageable person. I now understand that it is an extremely ordinary and unremarkable thing to feel overwhelmed by weddings, or even averse to them. As a society we do not lack for evidence that weddings are often superficial, performative, excessive, and annoying. There is a strong strain of wedding hatred in our culture underneath all the fanaticism. The hatred and fanaticism are, of course, intertwined.
This tension crops up in many wedding movies, which tend to depict weddings as a site of simultaneous love and resentment. (Or, in the case of the soothing and relatable Melancholia, a site of impending comet apocalypse.) Often, in wedding movies, it is the romantic partner who is loved and the family who generates the resentment, as in Father of the Bride or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But more recently, these movies have been about how women love and resent the wedding itself. The 2011 Paul Feig blockbuster Bridesmaids played this tension for slapstick comedy and sweetness. The 2012 Leslye Headland movie Bachelorette did it again, on a dark, acidic palette.
Before that, there was 27 Dresses, released in 2008, starring Katherine Heigl, and 2009’s Bride Wars, starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway. These deeply upsetting rom-coms were supposed to be about women who love weddings and for women who love weddings. But both movies seemed to really hate weddings, and to hate those women, too. 27 Dresses was about Jane, an uptight, sentimental, perpetually exhausted bridesmaid-handmaiden who became obsessed with weddings after she fixed a rip in a bride’s dress when she was a kid. “I knew I had helped someone on the most important day of her life,” Jane says breathily, in the opening sequence, “and I just couldn’t wait for my special day.” Throughout the movie, she compulsively denies herself self-worth and happiness, hoarding both things for her imaginary future wedding, planning other people’s rehearsal dinners and accruing huge piles of resentment in her soul.
Bride Wars is worse. Hathaway’s Emma and Hudson’s Liv are best friends who have also been obsessed with weddings since childhood. They get engaged simultaneously and accidentally plan their weddings at the Plaza for the same day. An all-out battle erupts as a result of this preposterously fixable situation. Emma, a public-school teacher who pays the $25,000 venue fee from the wedding nest egg that she’s been building since she was a teenager, sends Liv chocolates every day so that