2.27.2012

Married

Having been married for a full two months, I have compiled several observations on the topic. Chief among them is that marriage requires commitment. For example, I’ve made the commitments to become fatter, hairier and drunker than ever before. Hey, it’s not like I have to impress anyone now.

There are two responses I get when people find out I got married. Dingbats who live in a fantasy land start gushing with congratulations. Grownups who live in reality roll their eyes and insert an expletive into the question, “Why would you do that?”

The answer is basically this: I have been in a committed relationship for seven years, and after a certain amount of time the word “girlfriend,” starts to sound silly. The woman I intend to spend the rest of my life with should have a title that ranks her higher than someone I played kissy face with in junior high school.

So now I have a wife, and that title also happens to be useful to me as a humorist. “Take my girlfriend … please,” just didn’t have a ring to it.

My bride and I found the experience of getting married to be fantastic, but I would not recommend it to anyone else. If you are looking to get married, here are two reasons I think you shouldn’t:

1) You are not as in love as I am. You are desperate and insecure. Someone came along who seems to tolerate you, a few friends and family members have started teasing you that you should get married and you are pathetic enough to start considering it. Get your damn head screwed on straight.

2) Although getting married can be fun, planning a wedding and reception is like planning a space mission. It’s either going to be expensive or a disaster, and it’s likely to be both. If you choose to spend a lot of money you are a sucker, but if you don’t you are in for a lot of headaches. The situation is totally lose-lose.

Try to assign a dollar value to how much fun you can possibly have in a single day. You lose if you spend more than that amount on your wedding. But spending money is the only way to make things happen without dealing with them yourself. Sure, you can get your friends to cook a potluck for you, for example, but that means making your friends do work for you when they already hate you for making them sit through your stupid wedding.

Why don’t you skip having a meal? That would make everything easier, right? Well, you can’t really haul people to a ceremony and then either make them wait around or tell them to go find dinner on their own while you get 6,000 pictures taken before meeting them at the reception. And you have to eat before you spend several hours yelling over loud music and soothing your throat with wine.

I know you have all sorts of objections to the points I’ve made and still think you can have an inexpensive, fun, easy-to-plan wedding and reception. Trust me, you are wrong.

Even if you want to have a quick Justice-of-the-Peace wedding, skip dinner and simply have a straight-up party of a reception, there’s something you need to think about. You should never put all the people you know together in one room.

Allowing friends, family and work colleagues to mingle is a serious mistake. Each of the people in those groups knows approximately one-third of the humiliating episodes of your life and the range of personality flaws you reveal in select company. If you put all of them in a room together you will be completely stripped of whatever false sense of dignity you might have. Proceed with caution. 

Paul Lundgren is a newspaper columnist and a very nice man. His book, “The Spowl Ribbon,” is available online at paullundgren.com.