Bad Weddings

I may have never mentioned this before, but I'm not a fan of weddings. 

Prompted by a post about a couple who put on a nontraditional wedding party that included no food, and then wondered why people were affronted by it, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom tweeted an essay-worthy thread about the modern state of weddings. Here are a few bits of it:

We probably just need to get rid of weddings because people clearly cannot be trusted not to be chronically anti-social about them....

Either double-down on the patriarchy bits so we can have some goat meat and champagne or rebuke the whole thing altogether. But we have to stop these bad-for-no-reason weddings. They’re going to start getting people hurt.

Honestly, these wedding posts are one day going to be a text for the decline of consumer citizenship in late stage capitalism. The absolute perversion of hospitality while the state that sanctions marriage crumbles, all written on cakes paid for using Affirm....

Doing what you want is easier when you can afford what you want. The ritual of weddings is deeply tied to rules based on social class. If you adopt some of those rules — like gift exchanges — then you have to adopt the others — paying for food.

Reading the comments and seeing ones from people who talk about how they wanted their weddings to be great parties for the people they care about made me realize that I am profoundly antisocial. I've thrown parties in my time, but a wedding is not my idea of a party.