At some point on the third day of the wedding weekend, the luster wore off. It was in the middle of what was scheduled as an 11-hour “pool party” that it no longer felt like a “wedding.” It was hanging out on the beach with family I don’t often see and a whole not of other people I’d never met and will likely never meet again. Not a wedding, but a weird hang.
We are asking a lot of the wedding these days. To previous generations, “wedding” meant a ceremony and reception, plus a rehearsal dinner that was actually part rehearsal. For Millennials, the wedding has sprawled like the suburbs, gobbling up longer and longer stretches of time.
I’m guilty of this, too—my wedding was also a weekend in length, beginning with a large rehearsal dinner on Friday (no actual rehearsal until the following day!), ceremony and reception on Saturday, and an informal goodbye brunch of sorts on Sunday morning.
Compared to the wedding I just attended, though, my own felt small, held against a post-nuptial, next-day “party” that ran from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Without a ceremony or formal rite to pin down those 11 hours, the wedding glow receded. Was it a wedding anymore? Or was it a party?
Taylor Coe 