A very funny look at weddings

Lucy Mangan describes how, after having given up on the idea of marriage, she found herself swept off her feet - and the challenges of getting ready for the big day. I laughed out loud at several of her comments. Here's a couple of excerpts:

First of all, despite coming from a Catholic family, I don't believe in God. And while this doesn't exactly mean I therefore believe that marriage is 'just a piece of paper', it does remove one of the traditional main impetuses towards embracing the state.

Second - well, it has just always seemed like such an impossibly huge thing to be doing.

You don't have to believe in God to be daunted by the prospect of plighting your troth to someone for ever. I've watched a million friends get hitched and I've never come to see it as a mechanical or soulless experience.

At some point during every service I find myself become overwhelmed by the enormity of the undertaking. Not just at assembling unboned chicken breasts for 90 people, but promising yourself to someone else for life. For life. For life.

It always seemed to me the most grown-up thing you could possibly do. I know having children should have taken that pole position, but a lot of my friends got pregnant at school (well, not at school - at the nightclub round the corner) so childbearing has always been, in my mind, more firmly linked with adolescent idiocy and haphazard condom application than maturity and decision making.

Marriage, on the other hand - that's different. Among my friends, it is only those who take the matter seriously who have bothered. I've never been to a wedding where people are sitting in the back pews muttering 'Of course, it'll never last' because the couple at the front are 17, met three days ago in Faliraki and haven't sobered up yet.

. . .

I first met Christopher at a mutual friend's book launch. After a few glasses of wine, I was chatting to a group of fellow guests when I noticed a man standing by the window. He caught my eye for many reasons.

First, there were the clothes - an ancient pair of blue cord trousers, a frayed red gingham shirt and a green (probably) velvet (originally) jacket. He had a shock of thick, prematurely grey hair and a furious face.

When he caught me looking at him, he raised his glass so unsmilingly that my first thought was to wonder whether you could be hit in the face by a face.

My second thought was to raise my glass in turn, go cross-eyed and stick my tongue out so far that I almost licked my shoulder.

A moment later he was by my side. 'I've been looking for a woman who would realise that I can't help my terrible face all my life,' he said. 'I hoped I was beaming at you over there,' he said, frowning ferociously, 'but I wasn't, was I?' 'No,' I said.

'What about now?' he said, still frowning in a manner that would have killed any small child in the vicinity. 'Not really.' From such unpromising beginnings did our relationship grow.

. . .

The desire to get married, I realised, grows out of a desire to mark the difference in quality of this relationship from all the others.

And from there, it is but a small step to all-out madness. Within, I think, seven minutes of us arriving home from New York, my mother and sister arrived with 18 bags of paper, Europe's entire supply of lever arch files and a gleam in their eyes that boded ill for all of my hopes of a lowkey affair.

'We've printed out the internet,' said my sister with a demonic grin. 'Let's get to work.'

There's more at the link. Recommended, heart-warming and frequently very funny reading.

Peter