Wedding Perfection and Why I’m Glad I’m Love’s Executioner

For one of my counseling classes in grad school, I was asked to read a book titled Love’s Executioner about the difficultly one therapist had smashing his clients’ romantic obsessions and visions of love and marriage. While I didn’t particularly enjoy the book or the career, I’ve happily labeled myself Love’s Executioner – but unlike the harried therapist, I revel in reminding my students that the likelihood of them marrying their high school sweetheart and riding off into the sunset is highly improbable. I am the least romantic person I know. It isn’t that I don’t love my family – in fact, I feel highly satisfied with my life and all its variations – but I don’t think it should be an external display. Of course, it isn’t a surprise that when I went to see the exhibit at the Munson Williams Proctor Institute titled “Wedding Perfection,” I was bound to be cynical. That in mind, I didn’t invite my friend Jenn who is loves weddings and gowns and silverware patterns. I wanted the comfort of my wedding-hating bubble all to myself.
The traveling exhibition was two hundred years of wedding dresses. There were Vera Wang’s and 1800 finery, simple sheath dresses and ones made of leather and metal. Every single one made me thankful that didn’t choose to (and wasn’t expected to) don this uncomfortable uniform and command attention by doing an impression of an overly-iced cupcake.
Afterwards, I went home and gleefully worked on my screenplay “Exes” that emphasizes that relationships – even the ones that cost thousands of dollars and involve years of intricate planning – don’t always work out. Sometimes they end, painfully, and leave scars. I’m writing about the scars. Though it is not autobiographical, I’m examining my own scars and battle wounds, poking a stick in the tender parts of my psyche and asking, “why.” Why is it that even bad relationships make us (me) want to cling? Is the fear of something new so great that staying in a world of unhealthiness is a better option? These are the questions I play with, rolling them like colored marbles in between my fingers.
Overall, the wedding exhibition was good fuel for my creative juices and for me psychologically. My favorite display was an art installation piece called Wedding Dress by the artist Christo. It was a woman in white, tied with intricate knots of silk and satin, ropes lashing her to bulky white mass. Underneath the sack where the heavy stuff this poor bride’s future was made of: obligations to her husband, children, house, society. I loved it – marriage as a prison, the wedding dress just a prettier uniform for a life-long sentence. This is the raw material I hope my writing conveys… the less-than-happily ever after. The truth behind the pretty exteriors.
I am not a good undercover artist. I like words, and the way they look when I write them down, the way they taste when I say them. My silence during the exhibition (with “Here Comes the Bride” piped in all around me for added ambience) was maddening. I wanted to scream, “Oh these poor women! Why are we gawking at the corsets and the ribbon and the heavy bustles and thinking it’s beautiful?” I did not find it beautiful and had no one to talk about it with.
But then again, that’s art, isn’t it? The goal of the designer was not to make us all love weddings or universally desire a Cinderella story. The goal was to have a reaction, an experience. This is like my writing, the structure and design tell stories that beg for our reactions, positive or negative. Like the dress, we hope our art should live on after its debut.