It’s bittersweet looking at the royal wedding from the POV of somebody unmarried. Of course Prince William and his bride are destined to ascend to the height of the monarchy someday, unlike the common population. That’s a bit of a burden nobody would experience in everyday life.
The couple is stunningly attractive, have contact lists the size of the population of New York City and have grown up in the public eye and know how to interact with people. The rest of us have to struggle with real life dating rituals and the months and years of heartache that go with them.
The mysteries of how two people find each other and manage to spend years together as a legally and/or spiritually united couple aren’t always revealed to everybody. As a result, some folks never survive marriage for more than a few months or years before attaching themselves to another mate, some circulate among many partners but don’t find the “right” one, and others never date at all.
In my life I have seen beautiful people become miserable when married, plain or–dare I say, downright ugly– people find eternal happiness, and perfectly decent people somewhere in between who can’t make it off square one when it comes to the mating game. It all seems to happen by accident, for good or bad, and either way has its own perks and problems.
Weddings have become so lavish and ridiculously expensive, when it really seems to be about two people committing to each other and not who baked the cake or stamped their designer label on the gown. Women who are obviously not virginal (sometimes they are already pregnant) wear white to the wedding. In Vegas people can be married by a licensed Elvis impersonator. Does any of that matter?
The divorce rate in our country is high, which adds to the burden of the bills for the designer festooned wedding that takes years to pay off. And let’s face it: among the single people out there, it can be challenging to find and weed out the undesirables without getting your ego beaten up in the process. What is wrong with the whole picture of marriage, when it’s so tough to get it right?
I pass a few churches regularly, and I don’t see as many weddings as before. It’s sad to think that we have to wait for royalty to tie the knot to see what should be a more familiar scene: that of true love finding a way to make it happen and make it last.
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