But is each one just another opportunity for disaster? Cosper puts weddings in a class of red-alert events: “Any occasion where there’s particular pressure for things to be Very Romantic—an anniversary, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve—the super-elevated expectations set us up for drama and disappointment. Add to that the inevitable if unspoken questions a wedding raises about the couple’s own future, and you have ideal conditions for a knock-down-drag-out, or at least a respectably protracted snit.”
Exhibit A in the knock-down-drag-out category: Kevin, 26, an IT coordinator, and Celia, 26, a pharmacist, had been together for two years before attending their first wedding, where they succumbed to that most obvious of pitfalls—the open bar. After what Kevin describes as “too many glasses of red wine,” and Celia reckons was “the equivalent of my blood supply” in booze, they decided to discuss Celia’s traditional Church-of-England upbringing versus Kevin’s agnosticism.
Cut to full-scale drunken row.
They patched things up the next day, though, and soon their wedding-battle wounds became merit badges. When Celia slipped a disc and Kevin was sent to Singapore for work, the religion issue faded in significance. A little over a year later, in the place they first met—a summer music festival in Essex—Kevin went down on bended knee, in the mud, amongst the cigarette butts and empty pint glasses, to offer Celia a plastic ring from one of the stalls. “I feel sure that I want to marry Celia, what with getting through the fight at the first wedding and all,” says Kevin.