Stop inviting us to your weddings

If you love me like you say you do, then please, pretty please, don’t invite me to your wedding. 

I happen to believe that most people hate weddings but won’t say it. I will. And before I get into it – I’m going to tell you why I am the perfect person to make this argument. I had a wedding. 

In August, my wife and I will be celebrating four years of marriage. And we will have fun and trade gifts and smile so hard that you will be able to see all of our teeth. Now you should be wondering what’s the secret of our happiness. Well, it isn’t generic date nights, or random gifts or long walks in the park or breathing exercises. All of those things help, but that’s not it.

We smile during anniversary time because we don’t have a $250,000 in wedding debt. We chose to buy a house (money maker) over an extravagant over-the-top wedding (money taker). 

My wife wanted Cinderella’s ball and she deserved it all – from the long flowing white dress to the horse and carriage to the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder singing “Isn’t She Lovely” to the doves being released to booking T.D. Jakes to seal our union in front of 2,000 guests that we would be feeding lobster, crab cakes, bald eagle meat and lobster and crab macaroni too. And me being the person who dreams of making her dreams come true, I was willing to rob a bank or kidnap a Trump kid with the hopes of someone paying the ransom, in an effort to make this happen.

I wish the world could see my face when she forwarded me a draft of her guest list of 400 people. My eyes fell out of the sockets. We aren’t petty, so of course they would all receive a plus one which means 800 people, and this isn’t counting the 100-plus family members I have living in Baltimore. I also have close friends and professional relationships with people. that would also probably want to attend our wedding. So 2,000 guests was the real estimation. 

As a team we could have pulled it off . . . but decided that it’s not about the show, and it’s not about our family and close friends who dream of witnessing the show; it’s about us. So we had a small wedding where we only invited our intermediate family members and made attendance optional. We wed at 6:00 a.m. to celebrate the sun rising on our new union, and by 8:00 a.m. we popped champagne and gave the attendees gift cards so that they could go out to breakfast, as we were headed to Italy to celebrate. Simple.

Weddings now have cell phone policies, dance routines you must memorize, art directors, security guards, and they make you get in those goofy 360-degree photo booths even if you don’t want to. The fake wedding security guard says stuff like, “The bride and groom have requested your presence in the 360 photo booth and if you don’t comply we may ask you to leave.”

When I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got worse, because some wedding parties are now requiring dress codes for guests. Sure tell the people in the wedding party what to wear, but how are you going to impose on guests? One invitation we received said, “If you’re not wearing all white, then please don’t come.” And I don’t even have a white suit, like who has a white suit laying around? Do I look like a Colombian drug lord? 

Since we have been married, we strangely have been added to some type of list of people to invite to weddings. It feels like a wedding invitation comes in every day, like more than bills.  While my wife seems to enjoy them, as she rips open the save the date invitations – and quickly RSVPs to every person that invites us to their nuptials, even if they’re a stranger – deep down inside I know she doesn’t. She can’t. My wife has to hate weddings for the reasons that all of us hate weddings. 

The parking is always terrible, and as a man I am expected to wear a jacket, even though many weddings take place in the summer, which means I’m going to burn up on the walk from a terrible parking spot to the venue. The food is normally dried chicken or overcooked salmon or overcooked beef that always sucks. And maybe the food is good or was good at some point but I would never know because strangely we’re always at the table that gets served last. Never have I ever got the opportunity to sit at table two or three, the lucky people who get their disgusting meals directly after the wedding party. The line for alcohol is also always too long, and the conversations that go down between the strangers they seat you with are always super awkward. But there is an easy fix.

Stop inviting all of your friends to weddings, or you can invite them but don’t get upset if they don’t want to play by your extremely difficult wedding rules because even though we love you, we shouldn’t have to prove that love by being tortured on your special day. 

Also 50% of marriages end in divorce, so there’s that.