Reviewed by Summer Block
7.20.07

“For me, getting married has always been like throwing up,” says Lisa Carver in her essay “Back in Black”, “I do it as alone as possible, feeling sick, drastic, and doomed.” The line is dark, droll, and not likely to feature in any future wedding toasts. But Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think, a compilation of essays on modern weddings edited by Colleen Curran, would make an excellent bridal shower present—sometimes mordant, always smart, and in the end, surprisingly sentimental. Curran brings together 27 stories of independent women marrying early, marrying late, marrying pregnant, marrying often, or never marrying at all. On the way, DIY brides and third-wave feminists provide insight into the many hurdles of twenty-first century tradition, from registries and thank you note etiquette, to budgeting, catering and buying The Dress.

I got married last November, too early to have benefited from the wisdom of this compilation, but at just the right time to feel the angst that drives these questions. Any day you want to see a brawl, try going to popular blog Feministing.com and raising a question like, “Did you wear a white dress?” or “Did you change your name after getting married?” You will be greeted by a storm of women defending themselves and attacking others, flailing around desperately in a sea of choices our grandmothers never even got to make. For the generation that nurtured their romantic hopes on Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981, then cut their teeth on Gender Studies in 1995, every deviation from the norm is a statement, and every tradition kept an assent.

In “Diana, Martha, and Me,” Catherine Ingrassia cites some disturbing statistics. The average cost for an American wedding, she says, is $26,800, more than half the median household income, and an increase of 400% over the last 20 years. She then investigates some contentious wedding traditions, including white dresses (made popular by Queen Victoria in 1840). Of course, Ingrassia isn’t the first to demystify wedding tradition with a series of gotcha facts. The dubious provenance of diamonds, veils, and groomsmen doesn’t prove anything, as Ingrassia, wisely, concedes. Diamond engagement rings might be a plot engineered by DeBeers, and registries a plot by Macy’s, but, “As a culture we make meanings of weddings through white dresses, wedding cakes, and veils; they’re the lens through which we read romantic unions . . . The familiarity of the white dress and the cake help us—as individuals and as a culture—find comfort in rituals process the change a wedding represents.”

In “There Went the Bride,” Carina Chocano resists falling for the fairy tale, pondering “a tradition so thoroughly hijacked by commercial interests it made the contemporary consumerist Christmas look like a ritual of self-abnegation.” For women of my generation, women in their mid- to late-thirties, the big, white wedding had somehow...come to represent a sort of over-the-top, hair-trigger reaction to all the ambivalence, cynicism, and doubt that came before it. If you spend... the entirety of your twenties and a good part of your thirties in frustrating relationships, then the wedding, when it comes, presents a unique problem. Do you go quietly (and discreetly) after all that bitching? Or do you swallow a decade and a half’s worth of words and throw down?

Chocano decides to throw down, albeit in her own offbeat style, complete with a mariachi band and a “post-ceremony parade.” And she’s not the only one. In fact, the dominant thread of this compilation might be the writers’ capitulation to the traditional; in one form or another, nearly every bride winds up with a dress, an aisle, and a backyard full of guests. Why? Gina Zucker’s “My Mother’s Wedding, Myself: From City Hall to Having it All” posits one answer: “Maybe the bells and whistles were important because they represented something missing from our childhoods: tradition.” For many thirty-something daughters of Boomer parents, unconventionality is nothing new. The children of unmarried or often-divorced parents, parents who were married at City Hall in casual clothes, can be forgiven for wanting a tiered cake and linen invitations.

When I got married, I knew I wanted the whole shebang. My parents’ laidback hippie affair was not for me. Every generation has to rebel against their parents, and my rebellion took a lot of tulle. Like several authors in Altared, I poured over Martha Stewart, dog-eared Emily Post, and drove all over Oakland trying to find leftover mini-pumpkins a week after Halloween for the perfect autumnal centerpieces.

Altared contains many excellent serious essays, including Jennifer Armstrong's story of calling off her wedding in “The Best-Laid Wedding Plans,” Russian writer Lara Vapnyar’s story of rushed marriage and immigration in “The Girl, the Dress, and the Leap,” and Kathleen Hughes’ story of getting married after her father died in “Father of the Bride.” Some of the best, though, are the also the funniest, including Daisy de Villeneuve’s illustrated, "It All Started with Princess Di” and food writer Julie Powell’s marvelous “Rubber Chicken,” complete with two recipes and the phone number for Brooklyn’s Peter Luger’s steakhouse. Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Wedding Vow,” Sittenfeld vows to attend every wedding she’s invited to as a sort of penance, resulting in 20 weddings in 7 years, from “a four-day Pakistani-Indian extravaganza” to “the backyard affair in New Hampshire where the bride was barefoot, with blue toenails,” and Janelle Brown indulges her secret desire for a Calvin Klein duvet cover in “The Registry Strikes Back.”

I, on the other hand, loved the gift registry—and loved going with my fiancé to register at Crate and Barrel, where he tested the durability of our future household goods by trying to break the store models. Like contributor Janelle Brown, I loved my gifts, “loved hearing the doorbell ring, loved seeing the poor UPS deliveryman juggling half a dozen boxes, each the size of an oven, loved the explosion of Styrofoam peanuts.” Like hers, mine are presently in storage. But “if the life bequeathed to us by our registry hasn’t yet fully materialized, there is an adult quality to our lives now, a sense of a now-and-future Us (right there, in that closet!)”

Altared is full of heart-tugging moments, but it took Amy Bloom’s “Weddings for Everyone” to make me cry. Bloom’s essay is so open-hearted, so loving, funny, and wise, I wish I could have read it at my own wedding. Bloom rhapsodizes the toasts, the clothes, the food. She wishes weddings on every relationship that is constructed around fidelity and love, from best friends of 50 years to her middle-aged neighbor and her three cats. She offers some stern advice (“people who marry out of boredom and fear get more of the same”) and some catering pointers (“Christians? Plenty of booze . . . Jews? Double the hors d’ouevres”).

Having served as a bride, a mother of the bride, a bridesmaid, and a guest, Bloom has concluded that, “Weddings are not marriages, and I wish they were . . . Marriage is all about the long road, about terror and disappointment, about recovery and contentment, about passion of all kinds. Weddings are about a party.”

Bloom’s distinction between a wedding—a party—and a marriage is one that many other authors try to maintain as well, but the line between “I do” and what comes after is not so clear-cut. In “Weddings Aren’t Just For Straight People Anymore,” Anne Carle dissects her own desire for a public ceremony to mark a lifetime of private commitment, in this case, in a lesbian relationship. Due to the current illegality of homosexual marriages in virtually all of the United States, a homosexual wedding is the best example of a wedding for wedding’s sake, considering that this party, regrettably, has no legal standing. So why does Carle agree to engage in a practice which is not only sexist, but heteronormative, exclusive, and non-binding to boot?

“Because this is important,” Carle and her wife decided, “and we want people to see it.” For Carle and her wife, of course, this public announcement has an added dimension, as it allows them to stand up to discrimination, rally over one hundred of their friends and relatives, and bask in the community support that defies the nation’s disheartening polls and headlines.

But as powerful as Carle’s stance is, it’s not just homosexual marriages that are public affairs. The truth of marriage—a truth you often don’t learn until it’s too late—is that all private marriages are public affairs. Paradoxically, your life’s most intimate connection is also the one that binds you to a whole new family—not just the in-laws, but your husband’s college roommate, your new “couple” friends, your buddies who will see you from this day forward as a married woman. Weddings are a chance to present a new life to your new family, a community of people you’ve married into from that day forward. As Ingrassia writes, the public vows and readings connect us to all the weddings that have come before, and allow our community to assimilate this new information—we are married now. Weddings are about performance, ritual, and often, obligation. And when they’re done right, they’re a lot of fun.

As Blooms concludes, “I admire marriages: I puzzle over them, I analyze them, I long to get it right. But I love weddings.” It seems that despite the commercialism, the sexism, the hassle, and the hype, we all do.