Our Weddings, Our Selves

I went to the public library today.

[Let me digress just for a second to slip in a little Public Service Announcement about the public library. Don't get me wrong; I absolutely love bookstores and I have consumed (and subsequently stored) boxes and boxes of books. But library books are free! And they're better for the environment! And even if your little local branch doesn't have something, you can have it delivered pretty quickly from another branch. Amazing!]

I decided to pick up two cultural critiques of American weddings:

1. One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead
2. It's Our Day: America's Love Affair with the White Wedding, 1945-2005 by Katherine Jellison

Even the book jacket of One Perfect Day is tantalizing: "Using the American wedding as a rosetta stone...Rebecca Mead poses a series of questions that cut to the heart of our national identity. Why, she asks, has the American wedding become an outlandishly extravagant, egregiously expensive, and overwhelmingly demanding production?...What does a wedding tells us about how Americans consume, relate, and live today?"

And here's the clincher: "The American wedding gives expression to the values and preoccupations of our culture. For better or worse, the way we marry is who we are."

What a powerful statement: "The way we marry is who we are."

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