I love going to weddings. I think my favourite part is the assigned seating. Not only do they feed and water you, they tell you where to sit, so you don’t have to stay sober enough to choose your own. Looking at the wedding line-up for the next 10 months, I think it’s going to be a great year for romance.
My brother is one of those getting married this year – and soon. I know ‘writing vows’ is high on his and his fiancée’s list of things to get done in the next three weeks. Movies portray the writing of vows as such a romantic thing to do. The groom-to-be usually procrastinating, wanting to fill his verse with sports metaphors and hardware symbolism, and maybe the odd hockey game memoryfrom that trip with the boys. Meanwhile, the bride-to-be spends her time thinking of fond memories of long walks and surprise flower deliveries and sweet anticipation of things to come. But at the end of the movie, the vows are said with such great meaning in front of a crowd of adoring supporters, that the world almost seems to stand still while the prose is…..perfection.
I often wonder what it would be like to write vows of commitment, after you’ve been married for a few years. Would romance, honour, support and unwavering love be what you’d commit, or would you instead promise to forgive and forget, pledge to try your best not to wake your spouse up when you come to bed late, and admit that sometimes you’d like to go to bed angry. Would you declare that some things are too big to get over, and that when you fight no four-letter words are off limit? And in front of a room full of your closest and not-so-close family and friends, would you confess that there’s a chance that you might be in the bottom 50 percent for success rate. Could the movie still end the same way or would that end up on the cutting room floor?
Oprah’s had a big Best Life week. It was her way to kickstart the New Year – with better health, regular spirituality, more money, and better sex. Yes, Oprah is all about the sex. She’s had a few of these shows now, and I’m always amazed at the men who sit there, in front of 10 million viewers, without squirming, as his sex-life, and usually his wife’s unhappiness, is splayed on national television. Do his friends razz him about it later? Is it one of those topics that ‘mature guys’ just don’t discuss in the locker room? Does he sit there and wish that 24 years ago, his wife had stood at the altar and told him, in between promises of loyalty through sickness and in health, that she had said, “and I look forward to the day where I can be a guest on the Oprah show with you and tell you for the first time, in front of women across North America, that I hate sex.” Would Canon in D still play after that ceremony?
I took the easy way out – instead of talking from the heart, I repeated after the priest. Had I to do it again, I think I would do it the same way. The heart doesn’t know what it’s getting itself into.
