Whose wedding is it, anyway?

It was a cousin’s wedding that got me started on this admittedly meandering train of thought: a cousin in his thirties whose bride has pursued a career for several years now. Yet when they showed videos at the wedding reception that included their trips abroad as a couple, a number of guests were taken aback, to put it mildly. My own mother was astounded that they had actually traveled together prior to marriage.

Oh, she’d gone to other weddings where the happy couples had similarly gone on holidays together before they married and voiced her reservations about the propriety of it all. But she could not quite get her head around the thought of an actual relation going down the same route. Although I think she was more aghast that they had no qualms about showing the video of their trips together at the reception than she was at their actual journeying as a still-unwed couple.

In any case, it was rather amusing to watch her ideas about tradition clash with present-day practices. Even more so when one considers that she was responsible for my getting married when I did. That’s a tip, by the way. If there are any ladies out there having trouble getting their significant others to pop the question, my suggestion is: Get your mothers in on the act.

My then boyfriend dropped by one Sunday for his weekly house call when my mother suddenly sat down with us and, without missing a beat, asked him what his plans were. My poor hubby-to-be found himself stammering that we were thinking of marrying in a year’s time but, no, Mom could not accept that. What were we thinking? Trouble could break out any moment, didn’t we realize that? (This was in late November 1985, three months shy of the 1986 snap elections and the People Power Revolution.)

So my husband had come a-courting as a boyfriend and went home an engaged man. We married one week before the elections and got back from our honeymoon in time to cast our votes. And since a fair number of our principal sponsors and guests were heavily involved on either side of the political fence, you can imagine the main topic of conversation during the reception. By the way, if my mom had had her way, we would have gotten hitched the previous December, a logistical impossibility given the restrictions of time, which she firmly believed was not beyond her ability to overcome.

The point, of course, is that for someone who thought little of virtually proposing on her daughter’s behalf two decades ago, she is now bothered by the idea of couples getting to know each other more intimately before marriage. Never mind that there is far more to intimacy than two bodies and four legs in a bed. It’s the same syndrome that drives mothers of the bride crazy when the bride has to become one because she’s about to be a mother as well and promises to display the proof of it come the wedding day.

How best to hide that revealing bump or dizzy spell? And most likely, the person who’ll be crossing her fingers that the guests will not compute the length of time from wedding day to birthing day won’t be the bride, but her mother — and possibly his mother as well. But then we all know who really runs the show, don’t we? Or at least, would run the show if a couple gives even an inch. Which could become the whole nine yards before they know it.

It calls to mind another cousin’s wedding. When we threw a shower for his bride to be, she revealed that she had not yet settled on a hair stylist and makeup artist. The reason? Her future mother-in-law, my aunt, had not approved any of her choices yet. We all did a bit of a double-take at the revelation. It’s almost understandable when the mother of the bride calls the shots. But the mother-in-law?

Getting back to the subject at hand: Can there ever be a wedding that will meet everyone’s expectations or standards of what’s right or wrong? Probably not. Weddings tend to invite some of the cattiest remarks you can think of. Everything from the bridal entourage’s outfits to the wedding venue to the reception menu will come under fire. And Heaven help you if your emcee turns out to be less capable than Eddie Murphy at keeping a restless crowd entertained.

Members of my husband’s family are not going to forget the emcee at one relative’s wedding too soon. Not when she started conducting a game and shrilled, “Okay, kids, get in line!” Suddenly, the theory we’d all been spouting that she was actually a fast-food outlet party host doing wedding planning on the side did not sound too far-fetched.

Then there was the wedding where the guests were sharply divided between who deemed it simply outrageous and those who thought it divinely avant-garde. But that was only to be expected when the wedding march music was an eastern mélange of bells and cymbals and the readings the couple prepared were a mixture of New Age passages and poems on love and marriage. (The officiating priest scrapped the substitute for the gospel reading, however, pointing out it was not only inappropriate but completely disallowed in a Catholic ceremony.) And when the couple was about to kiss, the bride pulled her new husband into a theatrical clinch, making him dip her backward as if they were doing the tango.

My parents and youngest brother attended that wedding, they being good friends of the father and mother of the groom and he a close pal of the groom himself. While my brother declared the whole event inspired and worth emulating, my parents amusedly recounted an exchange that took place during the reception. One of their table mates observed that the priest had not pronounced the couple husband and wife. Whereupon a less-than-impressed relative of the groom blurted out: “Thank God!”  

But, snarky asides and social mishaps notwithstanding, if the bride and groom are happily coupled by reception’s end, who cares if the father of the bride could not quite smile about the fact that she had married a man almost twice her age? Or that the mother of the groom cried throughout the ceremony while the bride’s mom was positively radiant with active relief? It’s the final result that counts. 

After all, whose wedding is it, anyway?