From the New York Times, a feature on the new Argentine trend of throwing fake weddings to enjoy the spectacle and the celebration.
In case there was any doubt, as the couple (hired actors) left the stage, colored lights flashed, the disc jockey started the music pumping, and the announcement was made to the paying guests: “The wedding is fake, but the party is real.”
“The purpose of the ‘falsa boda’ is to convey joy and fun and live the happy moments related to love, without having to fall into the traditional ritual of what a marriage is,” explained Nacho Bottinelli, 30, one of the organizers.
The article notes that marriage has been declining as more couples cohabitate indefinitely, so the falsa boda are meant to fill the gap. And as they replicate everything but the heart of the ceremony, the party becomes more and more grotesque:
The ritual of placing a garter on the bride also gets a twist, with 10 single women and 10 single men from the crowd invited to also give it a try.
The whole piece reminded me of nothing so much as this warning from C.S. Lewis:
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?
But it seems to me pretty different to pay to go to a fake wedding (what seems to be happening here) than to throw yourself your own fake wedding (orders of magnitude cheaper, for example). It’s understandable to enjoy the pomp and circumstance of a wedding and the next cool thing in parties without wanting one yourself. If your critique is of the culture that produced a sad dearth of weddings, well, it seems like this is focusing on the symptom and not the (probably super complex and mostly economic) cause.
It’s definitely also a bad idea to throw yourself a fake wedding. But there’s something that seems sad about going to a fake wedding for the sake of feeling what weddings are like while none of your friends are really getting married. It also reinforces the wedding-industrial complex’s view that weddings are ultimately a party, not the awe-full joining of what no man can sunder (with accompanying celebration).
I don’t get the “diptych” part.
Made me think of this line: “The same false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity…”
They succeeded. Drunken titillation
is more interesting than what they made marriage into.
Diptych just because I was juxtaposing these two pieces of writing.