Wedding Wars

If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Come Sit Next To Me At The Wedding!

Ideally one would think that a wedding is a celebration of the love between two happy people and the commitment to spend their lives together, come what may.  And it is, at least for those two people.  For others, it’s another chance to dredge up old grievances (or manufacture news ones!) and allow them to erupt into scene-stealing battles that threaten to make the day REALLY memorable for those on the sidelines.  Weddings are unlike any other cultural ritual in that it’s often a requirement to fill a room with a selection of people who can’t stand the sight of each other, no matter how well dressed they are.  Then you limber them up with bubbly liquids or amber fluids that give them a case of Irish Alzheimer’s: “forget everything but the grudge” (I’m sorry if that’s ethnically insensitive, but I heard it first from an Irish friend).  And presto!  You’ve got Wedding Wars!

Wedding Wars can take many forms, everything from the wedding equivalent of the Hundred Years War to the lightning attack on Pearl Harbor.  Most people don’t tell me where family land mines are lurking, so I have to figure out for myself which people not to invite to stand next to each other in a formal photo.  But occasionally they do clue me in and I have to do an elaborate dance around the palpable tension that can explode at any time.  A few examples:

1. The parents of the groom who refused to participate in anything to do with the wedding after inventing some slight from the bride, until announcing they expected to attend the ceremony, along with fifty of their closest friends.  After the invitations had gone out.
2. The bride who told me never to get a picture of her with her sister because she hated her guts and hadn’t seen her in ten years.  (They ended up in each other’s arms, blubbering away, about halfway through the reception.)
3. A mixed religious wedding in which one family was totally supportive and the other family wished they were anywhere else on the planet as long as it was at least a thousand miles away from the first family.
   
4. The Mom From Hell who committed the ultimate sin (telling her daughter she looked fat in her dress) leading to a screaming fight just a few minutes before the ceremony.
5. And the Dad From Hell who commanded me to take his family photos before the other family showed up because he refused to speak to them.

And on and on.  You get the idea.  I’ve never seen anyone engage in actual physical combat, mostly because psychological warfare is generally much more painful. But I guess it does happen, not only in the movies but in allegedly real life.

Sometimes it’s not even the family bringing the trouble. Bridesmaids can be the source of another kind of conflict. One is chosen to be the maid of honor and all the rest are jealous. It’s like high school all over again. Maid of Honor = Popular Girl, therefore all the others hate her and want to inflict pain. Or the Maid of Honor can’t take the pressure and goes nuts-o:

In the end it all comes back to those two people and what they want, and everyone who can’t get on board should stay home, get drunk, and watch WWF.  No need to dress up for that.

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