It’s wedding season and, in weddings as in Hollywood, the image is everything. Photographic studios are full of glossy pictures of glowing brides, and some shadowy husbands, kissing under the blossoms, beside the lake, on the picturesque bridge, walking hand in hand through the woods, sprinkled with artificial stardust, and in every romantic setting that the photographer could contrive.
These formal wedding photographs are rather like the food pictures that appear on restaurant websites. They show how the product ought to look. But a wedding, like a dinner plate, is only perfect until it turns into something else – a marriage or a meal, as the case may be. Perfection is a hard act to follow, and some degree of disenchantment is inevitable. But whatever happens in the next thirty or forty years, the happy couple will always have their pictures to remind them why they did this.
Weddings are big business, to the tune of about seventy billion dollars a year. The average full-scale wedding costs almost $30,000. Now that people marry for life, not just once but several times, the wedding industry’s turnover has increased in proportion. Hen Parties and bachelor parties provide yet more profits for bars and restaurants that they don’t destroy in the frenzy of celebration, photographers and videographers do very well out of it too, not to mention the stretch limousine companies, the airlines, and honeymoon hotels.
It is a reassuring, highly regulated world, though strangely lopsided, like a coronation. The wedding will last for only a few hours, and the marriage may last for years. Eight years is the average. But that part of our lives is lived, as it were, offstage, unless we are celebrities. The wedding is a rare moment of public theater, which is why we need those photographs and videos.
These are very ancient rituals. The wedding represents the couple's public commitment to each other, so everyone knows it’s not just naughtiness. The honeymoon originated with the old Norse practice of kidnapping a bride from the neighboring village. The result, then as now, was that she left her family and got to travel a bit. Both rituals function as a kind of test, an ordeal designed to sort out the winners from the losers, genetically speaking.
Weddings are never easy. Honeymoons can be even harder, and marriage changes everything. Practical questions crowd in: how will they file their taxes? How many cats will they have? Will he get to keep his own name? But couples who can survive a traditional wedding and a traditional honeymoon in some place like Bora Bora or Venice should find a lifetime of marriage comparatively easy.
The cost of a wedding and the quality of the photographs don’t seem to have much effect on the quality of the subsequent marriage, one way or the other, although couples who have hugely expensive and elaborate weddings may stay together longer just out of embarrassment. On a personal note, our wedding was photographed by one of my aunts against the wall of the town hall in a downpour. The long marriage that followed could not have been improved.
