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Don’t just say, “Yes”. A marriage is more than a dream wedding
Weddings are extravagant one-day events, while marriages are lifelong commitments. The $75 billion industry overshadows the importance of the actual partnership
At one level, it’s a matter of semantics. Indians often use the terms Wedding and Marriage interchangeably. The former is a one-day event. The latter, if all goes well, is a lifelong partnership. What guests attend is the wedding, what the couple commits to is the marriage.
On another level, Indian weddings are so huge, so all-consuming, so pressuring, it’s hard not to be swept up in the excitement of that one big day. The wedding industry in India is worth $75 billion or ₹6.2 lakh crore; each wedding has, on average, 310 guests, according to a report by WedMeGood. Prep, if you include fitness training, trips to the dermatologist, proposal videos, engagement parties, trousseau curation, bachelorette and bachelor parties and pre-wedding photo shoots, can start 18 months in advance.
Now, consider how early and how much a couple preps for the actual marriage, and the shiny numbers dim. No wonder, as Sima Aunty puts it on Indian Matchmaking, “marriages are breaking like biscuits”.
Writer Salman Rushdie pointed this out more than a decade ago. He’s been married, and divorced, four times. In 2008, after he and TV host Padma Lakshmi ended their relationship, he put out this sly tweet: “Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before – it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a marriage. If only you could have weddings without marriages.” Users trolled him, not for the words, but his implication that women are to blame for unions fracturing.
Marriage is not a bad thing. Neither is singlehood. Problems arise when family pressure, all those bride-running-in-the-rain movie climaxes, and one’s own deep-seated fears push men and women into relationships and commitments they haven’t fully considered.
Romcoms play up all the wrong moves. In the Wedding Plan (2016), a woman is blindsided by her fiancé a month before their big day, but decides to go ahead with the wedding anyway, hoping to snag the perfect man on the way to the altar. Marry Me (2022) has an even more absurd plot. A major pop star finds out, minutes before an on-stage wedding, that her fiancé was unfaithful. She picks a random man from the audience and marries him instead. Clearly the wedding is more important than the marriage. And no, it doesn’t matter that Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson make for a cute pair.
It took guts, then, for the creative team of the Sex and the City movie (2008) to flip the narrative. Carrie, who struggled more with dating than she did with dressing, is finally marrying Big. What starts out as a small ceremony snowballs: voluminous designer dress, photographers, crowds. The groom, overwhelmed, doesn’t even show up. The makers of Bride Wars (2009) ripped the veil off too, focusing on how weddings can eclipse other relationships. The film shows childhood BFFs who grow up, planning every detail of their weddings. They are so focused on their own perfect big day, it ends in sabotage, disaster and one wedding that is called off.
Weddings are rarely cheap. No one intends to do them more than once. They’re worth the shiny details, the smiles, the toasts, the happy tears. But they shouldn’t overshadow the years to follow. Consider that therapists refer to sessions with couples as premarital (not pre-wedding) counselling. They aim to prep couples to be more honest, more upfront, more in sync even before the rings are exchanged.
Because ultimately, if you really want to start a life together, you won’t be so hung up on the first day. Phoebe and Mike married each other in a snowstorm, on an NYC street, with just their friends in attendance on Friends (1994-2004). It was perfect.
