Maybe Everything Depends on the Wedding

The traditional happy ending has the young lovers heading off together into the sunset. What the writer leaves out is the fact that not only do the lovers travel into the sun (such a beautiful and straightforward metaphor for the future) but the rest of the world rides off with them as well.

I worry some that all this negativity towards what we know to be Truth and the Good in Life may mean that certain people out there honestly don’t understand the idea of happy endings. Denial of things like the importance of public health and rational environmental investments carry an obvious dark and cynical set of presumptions.

Jean and Joe (hypothetical lovers turned betrothed) don’t simply land somewhere warm, cozy, golden and ideal to live by themselves forever and ever. They become different people from the moment they are pronounced a team. They influence each other every day as their love blooms, they join finances and insurance coverage, have kids (or not), struggle with their love, learn things about themselves they never really knew, etc.

Jean and Joe certainly become changed people once they head into that sunset and so are the rest of us. We’re all moving in a slightly new and quite simply unique, changed world together, following that couple online and through gossip for a time, watching and admiring their courage, their beauty and their innocence. Make no mistake, we are all moving into the future with new and astoundingly hopeful young (generally) people. It’s strange, though, how singularly small-minded and limited those of us a generation forward (and more) can be and how much we forget about the meaning of life by the time we’re in our forties.

The world has always been about Jean and Joe. All that sexual, romantic, courting, and flirting behavior most of us go through may seem like a search for self-pleasure, but it’s actually a drawn out attempt to nestle down with life in just the right way so that the likes of Jean and Joe can come into the world. It’s always been about the next generation!

Weddings represent one of three advanced moments where we are ultimately reminded that life is about moving from the present forward into the future. The other two acts are the births of children and the death of loved ones. All three of these things are happening all the time everywhere. That is the essence of life. Joy, hope, faith, deeper feelings than we usually let ourselves feel, an awareness that this life we are all leading right now is amazing and wondrous.

Sadness, too. As we move forward (off into so many sunsets to come) we leave pieces of our lives behind. That’s, perhaps, most obvious when a parent or sibling dies. But it’s true as well when children come into the world, especially first-borns. Those parents will never be the same! It’s true as well, and perhaps most fully, when a young couple weds. Everyone at that wedding will be changed forever, not just the bride and groom. For some, the change may be slight. For others it will be profound. The joining of two disparate family trees is the first and most obvious change, but that’s just the beginning. Lives get touched in so many ways not just because of a wedding, but because of those young spouses and what they will do with their lives and where they shall live and who they will touch together and all the unintended consequences and accidents of their life together.

Undoubtedly, not all will be brilliant and wonderful. The most amazing thing about human beings is their ability to wreak havoc on each other and to lose sight of what truly matters in life. However, on the day of a wedding there is none of that. There is, of course, a profound sense of vulnerability the couple may feel both individually and together — vulnerability and a sense of grave seriousness. But we are all together on this earth and the joining of two human beings through their commitment to one another secretly fills every empty space in the universe. If you listen, you can hear those spaces filling up. There will be a moment when time shifts gears. It will be subtle, only a few will sense what I’m talking about, and they may be anywhere on this planet at that moment.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that there are wizards and mystics and psychics and that the rest of us are mere mortals and fools with little ability to connect to mysteries and magic. What I’m sure of is that everyone has transmission and reception abilities but only become aware of them at special moments of life. Maybe those moments aren’t so much “special” as random or accidental. Maybe those moments come about the same way tripping on the stairs comes about–that stunning feeling, startled, worrying some in the middle of a flash, stunned. Anything can happen when you trip like that. Whatever the case with that metaphor, I’m sure each of us has the ability to connect to what’s under the surface when empty spaces are filling with joy and sorrow and hope and determination.

As a storywriter and novelist, I spend my days transfixed by the mystery of creative instinct. All artists, on every level whether beginner, amateur, or professional, know and understand that we all create reality together. That’s what the idea of community is. We create together in the take-out line at burger joints, and we do it at the doctor’s office, and we do it when we fix a leaky faucet in a neighbor’s kitchen, and when we walk by a panhandler on the sidewalk.

What I’m addressing in this little essay, though, is our collective creativity arising through weddings. Except in extreme cases, life is never acts of singular people turned inwards, unto themselves. We are all in the world together and what happens to you happens to me whether any of us see that or not. In fact, if you look at things properly, we are all heading off into the sunset together every day. There are thousands of Jeans and Joes who will marry next weekend. Know you are honoring them for the good tidings they represent to their families and friends, but know as well everything in life depends on them–their children too.