One can only stand around with the groom's cousins from California chatting about wedding attire for so long. So I decided to take Pastor James up on his advice, and see what I could learn about myself and my community at Anne and Roger's wedding. I decided that postmoderns should love weddings, because it appears that their meaning is tensile, and depends entirely on your point of view. A recently divorced buddy of mine felt wistful as he watched Anne and Roger toast one another with champagne. Well-meaning aunts come up to you and ask when you're getting married.
Second marriages are a whole different kettle of fish.
They tell you to find yourself first. It's been carefully planned. That weddings are important, of course, is not a new idea. Historians of American women have observed that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wedding was the one day when people were sure to pay attention to a woman. It was the one day when she, not her older brother, or her male cousin, or her beau or husband, was the star.