As you may know, my partner and I got married this past September. It was a wonderful affair, particularly since it melded my Chinese-Vietnamese family of 40-plus members with my partner’s large Chinese family of 25-plus members. Added to this great mix of familiar faces were several of our chosen family members – the people we have the privilege of calling our friends. That is a beautiful story for which I have far greater things to say. However, today’s newsletter does not revel in nostalgia. Today’s newsletter is redolent with a far less celebratory feeling.
Today’s newsletter is about the Wedding Industrial Complex.
As a child, I never thought I would get married nor did I ever dream of having a wedding. I grew up exceptionally homosexual, weary of dresses, and loathed parties in which I was the center of attention. On top of all of that, my understanding of weddings was shaped by the many traditional Vietnamese weddings I was forced to attend. For those of you who are unaware, Vietnamese weddings must have at least 3 of the following 5 criteria to be considered Vietnamese:
- Bride/Groom you do not know, probably your doctor’s third nephew or the guy who delivers water to your house
- Someone unironically singing Celine Dion’s “Power of Love” and/or Bryan Adam’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”
- Your uncle throwing up in the backseat of your Nissan Quest and/or Toyota Previa
- Your mom or aunt disappointed that the Bride/Groom went for 12 course option as opposed to the 15 course option with the Peking Duck, those cheap fucks
- Sad, punctual white people
My worldview shifted when I fell in love (that bitch.*) and gay marriage was legalized. My partner and I decided why not celebrate our community and our union through a non-oppressive, non-heteronormative party that we can call a “wedding”?
Friends, let me tell you about what weddings do to people – in this case, me. I – a person who doesn’t mind eating a bag of Cheetos for breakfast or who wears denim on denim by choice – suddenly cared about some bullshit. Let me describe:
Wedding Planner: What kind of glasses do you want?
Me: There’s more than one option?
Wedding Planner: Why yes, there are Collins glasses, mason jars, wine glasses, and martini glasses. If you’d like to do shots, there are shot glasses. Each glass has a function.
Friends, here is where you the trap begins. The great irony of wedding planning is that it is a very educational, illuminating experience. You are planning a highly emotional, incredibly symbolic, and very personal event for a large group of people. You are doing so in concert with someone you love. And yet, if you do this experience correctly, you will NEVER have another wedding. So, all this hogwash that you learned will not be used again.
For instance, here are some of the most informative lessons of wedding bullshit that I learned – lessons that are now obsolete:
- Fig 1 is a chart that outlines the infinite shades of white concocted for weddings as well as accurate descriptions of said shades.
- Fig 2 highlights the confounding correlation between how expensive something is with how old (“rustic”) it looks. Note that if something looks like it has been lit on fire, it probably has been lit on fire and is exceedingly expensive.
- Fig 3 is a Venn diagram that shows the overlaps between gay rights and weddings. Note that there aren’t very many overlaps.
Given that most people are planning a wedding for the first time, there is very little lived experience to build off of – not even that off-the-chain surprise birthday party I had at Celebration Station in the 7th grade. Friends, you are left to consult with other people, which further pushes – shoves you – further into the trap. You can’t consult with family because they are biased. Family will always, inevitably swing in either telling you do nothing (no glasses!) because it is too expensive or to choose the most expensive option because of the delusion of optics. Friends try to help, but because wedding budgets are highly variable, all they can offer you is tealight candles from Ikea – especially the lesbians who seem to be operating some kind of underground tealight candle exchange. Your partner can be semi-helpful, but she is probably so sick of you and all the decisions and is more than likely passed out on a bed somewhere at 8 PM, hardly moving either from being dreadfully exhausted or dead – it’s hard to tell.
This is the trap. You’re on your own, left to consult with the “experts” – the blogs, the wedding planners, etc. And so, here, in the lurid depths of the Wedding Industrial Complex, is where you land:
Me: I’ll take all the glasses.
And I did.
*Editor’s Note: That bitch…that I love.