Of rings and bonds

The morn­ing dawned through the nar­row slits in my half-sleepy, half-asleep eyes, and I con­sidered the day ahead. Sat­urday. There was a nag­ging sen­sa­tion, a feel­ing, that there was some­where I was sup­posed to be today. Then it slowly began to dawn on me. I should have been get­ting dressed up to the nines and, as is my wont, feel­ing excess­ively nervous, with more but­ter­flies flut­ter­ing around my stom­ach than both the bride and groom whom God is about to join together so that no man shall put them asunder.

A wed­ding. That’s it. A wed­ding across town. I should be at a wed­ding, even though I gen­er­ally loathe such occa­sions. Hate them with a pas­sion. Yet I really should be at this par­tic­u­lar wed­ding. Indeed, I even want to be at this one, and not merely for the pur­pose of toast­ing the new­ly­weds, quickly but inev­it­ably fol­lowed by a rapid des­cent into mild drunk­en­ness and embar­rass­ing myself in front of respect­able fam­il­ies of com­plete strangers.

Inter­lude, to be read by the unnamed bride only: If you’ve happened across this entry some­time after your hope­fully bliss­ful hon­ey­moon, and your face is by now dis­play­ing a look of wide-eyed hor­ror coupled with a huge sigh of relief that I didn’t man­age to make it to your big day, you should prob­ably ima­gine me clum­sily drap­ing my arm round you and hold­ing yet another glass of spark­ling cham­pagne aloft as I lurch towards your left ear and com­mence slur­ring. Loudly. “You are my besht­esht, besht­esht friend in the whole wide world. I know that I’ve only jusht met you, right? Right? But you’re my besht­esht friend evah! Really. I love you. I mean, I do. Not like your new hus­band loves you, right? No, not like that — it’s okay, mate, jusht my little joke, see? — but as a friend. My new besht­esht friend. I know we’ve, like, only jusht met and shtuff, but you’re my besht­esht friend and I feel like I’ve known you forever …”

I was sur­prised at my desire to be at this wed­ding, though. My pre­vi­ous exper­i­ences of such cere­mon­ies num­ber only two, neither of which fea­ture the fond­est of memor­ies. At the first, the bride and groom wrote their own vows. Hear­ing this wor­ry­ing news, I pre­pared for the moment when I would have to sidle off and hide myself behind the tower­ing wed­ding cake, whilst I stuck my fin­gers down my throat in order to vomit at the sick­en­ingly cloy­ing sen­ti­ment­al­ity of it all. Unfor­tu­nately, when the read­ing of the vows arrived, I found myself weep­ing. And sniff­ing. And dab­bing at my eyes with a paper tis­sue — a paper tis­sue, moreover, that was passed to me by the groom’s mother because she had obvi­ously taken pity on my poor tear-stained self whilst still man­aging to shed fewer tears than me. Need­less to say, I was mor­ti­fied. I have a repu­ta­tion as a bit­ter and twis­ted cynic to uphold, you know.

At the second wed­ding, I only turned up for the post-ceremony garden party and, know­ing no one except the bride, spent three hours sit­ting under a tree listen­ing to the rather intense and socially awk­ward eight-year-old son of one of the guests as he lec­tured me in author­it­at­ive detail about the com­plex­it­ies of the Star Wars films. (That par­tic­u­lar series of science-fiction movies is, of course, a noted favour­ite of mine. Pos­sibly. In some par­al­lel universe.)

Des­pite the fact that the wed­ding I was invited to today could, poten­tially, have been littered with more social anxi­et­ies than someone of my nervous dis­pos­i­tion even cared to think about, I dearly wanted to be there — mainly because I wished, finally, to be intro­duced to the bride. That’s right, I have never met her in per­son. She is one of those mys­ter­i­ous people whom my mother, whilst eye­ing me some­what sus­pi­ciously and employ­ing a dis­tinctly dis­ap­prov­ing tone of voice, calls an “inter­net friend”. We have read each other’s sites for some years, cor­res­pon­ded via long, free-form emails cov­er­ing such wide-ranging top­ics as Everything and Noth­ing, and recom­men­ded favour­ite authors to each other as only book­ish types do. Even so, I was still sur­prised when, in a curi­ously trust­ing but deeply touch­ing ges­ture, she invited me to join her for one of the most import­ant days of her life.

Sadly, of course, a sud­denly depart­ing lower right leg rather put paid to my plans to attend. Whether I would have man­aged to con­quer the nerves and all-encompassing social ter­ror to be there if my leg had remained attached is another ques­tion entirely. But I truly hope so.

And so it is that I have spent some of today ima­gin­ing myself and the only other invited guest I know — who shares a very sim­ilar rela­tion­ship to the bride as myself — stand­ing nervously on the fringes of the post-nuptial cel­eb­ra­tions, look­ing for all the world like startled deer trapped in the pier­cing glare of car head­lights. Occa­sion­ally, we would greet and hug the bride with giddy, bursting-at-the-seams excite­ment as she passed through the happy throng, and then giggle like naughty school­chil­dren when other rel­at­ives and fam­ily friends approached us to ask whether we’re with the bride or groom’s party.

“With the bride. Yes, we’re with the bride. No, we’ve never met her. No, and we’ve never met each other before today, either. Unusual? Well, yes, I sup­pose it is a little unusual. But we’re all friends. Though we’re from three dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Yes, that’s right, the inter­net. Yes, hil­ari­ous, isn’t it?”

I’m assum­ing, indeed I’m hop­ing, that it would become easier to explain this some­times odd three-way friend­ship as the hour got later and the bub­bly stuff suc­ceeded in loosen­ing our taut nerves. If not, we would have to give up on sense and start invent­ing bizarre, far-fetched tales about being suf­fer­ers of wed­ding pho­bia, for whom attend­ance at this joy­ful cel­eb­ra­tion is an essen­tial part of our thera­peutic treat­ment pro­gram. Or something.

Tonight, then, I’m toast­ing the hap­pily mar­ried couple with a glass of lemon ice tea rather than cham­pagne, and wish­ing that I could be there to gently unnerve some of your guests with my part­ner in crime for the day. In my absence, I’m dis­ap­poin­ted to say that I wasn’t even able to buy you the gift of a toaster, des­pite regard­ing it as an abso­lute neces­sity to invest in such an utterly ste­reo­typ­ical item for new­ly­weds set­ting up home together. Never mind, because my pres­ence — or even my present — isn’t what’s import­ant here. All I ask is that you make sure that one of the tin cans tied to the rear bumper of the wed­ding car has my name scrawled upon it, because I prom­ise that it will be car­ry­ing my best wishes for every hap­pi­ness to a bride I’ve never met. And her hus­band, of course.

I should be at a wed­ding today. A wed­ding across town. Oh, and across the small mat­ter of an ocean, too.