Wedding March For An Army Of One

I’ve been to a lot of weddings lately, and I’m beginning to wonder two things:

#1 Can these online dating sites really be that successful? and…

#2 Why should married people get all the big expensive parties?

As far as parties go, weddings aren’t really very efficient. There is a long boring part in the middle where everyone sits around getting hungrier, thinking about that rigatoni and all the things that they could be doing with their Saturday instead. The usual excuse is that they needed to take the wedding photos during this period, but I’m pretty sure that Mt. Rushmore took less time to carve than the amount of Saturday that goes up in flames between the ceremony and the reception. you should take pictures some other time, such as before the wedding, or at one of your anniversaries.

Not only do weddings commonly waste your whole weekend, but more and more brides and grooms are choosing to have their weddings on holidays. This is a bad idea for both you and your guests. Not only do the guests have things they would rather be doing on New Year’s Eve but I’m pretty sure that the newlyweds would prefer not to spend every anniversary at the neighborhood 4th of July barbeque if they actually thought it through. So the next time you’re thinking about saying “I do,” you might want to think about saying “I don’t… want to make my guests wait hungry and bored, listening to the cheapest DJ you could find for 5 hours on New Year’s Eve.”

Which brings us back to my original question, why should married people get all the big expensive parties? Of course I’m not suggesting that single people should have weddings for themselves, that wouldn’t make any sense. What I am saying is that single people should have bachelor/bachelorette parties. I suggest that we start celebrating singleness as well. After all, if getting married is one of the most important decisions of your life, then each year that you decide not to get married is an equally important decision. I’m not saying that I’ll never get married, all I’m saying is, why can’t I have a bachelor party right now? I am a bachelor. Much more so than somebody who is going to get married on the next day.

I’m pretty sure that corporate America would have no problem getting behind this idea. Bed Bath and Beyond would have no problems with letting everyone set up a gift registry. Or in my case something more along the lines of Best Buy or even Burger King.

We could eliminate all the downtime between any ceremony and the reception by only having a reception. I would still have a color theme to keep all the ladies happy and have those colors be the same as the local college football time to trick the guys into matching. Sure there may be a lot of gown and sweatshirt couples, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take. And the best part is, an event of this kind would actually make for a fun weekend and an even more fun holiday. In fact, a bachelor party is the perfect way to celebrate newer, lesser known holidays such as “Shark Week” and “Shrimpfest.”

So for all the couples who are planning your weddings, I hope you learned a valuable lesson from our little talk and maybe consider having your wedding on a Tuesday night when there’s nothing good on TV. Meanwhile, I’ll be planning my own bachelor party. And I’ll be sending out the invitations via Facebook so RSVPing is just a click away.