Love Is Not Going to Bridal Showers
There is no doubt in my mind that if you are reading this, you have spent time and money celebrating the relationship milestones of other people. Bridal showers, engagement parties, bachelor parties, and bachelorette weekends, destination weddings, baby showers, gender reveals (the worst!), maybe even a divorce party or two. It can be exhausting - summer is literally called “wedding season” now. It can feel like a marathon, configuring your calendar for the many weekends of your summer that are spent gone for weddings and how many Saturdays must be set aside for baby showers. You start to measure your popularity like a 3rd grader again - by how many invitations you get.
Kill. Me. Now.
I am always be grateful to be an invited guest of someone’s wedding, shower or celebration, so it was always hard for me to say anything other than yes when invited. But the pandemic changed things for me - as my social life shrank, my boundaries on my time changed too. I’ve become much more guarded in how many events I attend. I still cherish every invite but my attendance is much more considered these days.
Yes money is a piece of this - what’s the ballpark to attend a wedding away from where you live these days? $1,000 for hotel, airfare, meals, gift, dress, let’s say. I still have an auto draft line item in my budget for it! That’s a lot of money to spend for being “together” for about five hours - maybe 5pm ceremony til the 10pm required shutdown by the wedding venue. But in a cash rich world (which is not a given and not taken for granted), the money is almost beside the point.
For me, it’s now the time. A few years ago, a friend did a deeply depressing calculation: at 36, we have approximately 4 years and therefore 208 weekends left before we turn 40. 40 feels like an age when people both in the club and in your life start to look at you funny if you’re still partying every weekend. So every Saturday is precious. Every weekend is 0.5% or 50 basis points of that last gasp of youth.
I am not burning an entire weekend - an opportunity for me to go on a date, grab drinks with a colleague, try a new yoga class, brunch with a friend, check out a museum exhibit, run through the park, touch up my mani pedi, clean my apartment and destress before Monday - on a chance to spend four hours partying at the Boise Country Club. I’m good. I can spend the $100 to send you a nice present and grab brunch with you when you get back from the honeymoon.
For my very nearest and dearest, I’ll still make the trek. The year of this 0.5% weekends calculation, I only went to one wedding - the couple who were my bubble at the beginning of the pandemic. I officiated their East Coast ceremony and traveled for the bachelorette party which I had a small hand in planning. But for most others, you’re getting something from your registry and my sincerest (truly!) warm wishes.
Love is not events. These events are valiant attempts to put a physicality to the emotions and relationships that drive our lives. Throughout history, weddings have always been opportunities for joy in our otherwise boring or tumultuous lives. But weddings are not what constitutes life. They are not what drives love. They are how we show our communities that we are loved, not how we show our beloved our love. Those are the smaller moments, the in betweens, the sips between deep breathes. The Tuesday afternoons instead of the Saturday nights. Sometimes I think I overromanticize the everyday, but then I remember: what better to fall in love with than every day?
