Why Wedding; or, I missed my yoga class by 5 minutes tonight

On the subway home from work tonight, a coworker and I were talking about my upcoming nuptials, and she shared how she and her husband had once questioned whether or not they would even go through the formality of getting married, a dilemma which parental influences helped to resolve.

Because I am one to take a simple comment and stretch it across the room and back again, this gave me pause to consider why, indeed, I do feel it necessary to formalize my relationship with M.. After all, plenty of couples are perfectly happy in their marriage-less relationships. Our friends Demie and the Baker have been together for twenty years, with shared finances and shared residences and shared joys and sorrows and a deeply committed love, and the only aisle they've walked down together is the one at Price Chopper. And they're happy.

Of course theirs is a contextual set-up, and if they were a straight couple then perhaps, given the decade, they'd have been more likely to have gotten married. Still, though, this begs the question, Why? Why go through all the hustle and bustle and expense and headache and anxiety of planning and implementing a wedding - - setting aside the fact that certain aspects of this planning and implementation are enjoyable, in and of themselves, for certain anonymous masochists - - when one could just as easily maintain a straight (so to speak) course down the path of pure and unadulterated formality-free love and commitment?

My first answer is because, personally, I want to formally declare my love for this man.

Response: OK, so why can't you do that in your living room over a nice bottle of chianti? Oh and also, bullshit, you just want the presents.

To which I clarify, I want to formally and publicly declare my love for this man.

Response: So take out an ad in the Village Voice. Or go down to the courthouse and register as domestic partners. Or take a few friends out to dinner. I'm sure they'd pitch in for a Kitchen-Aid (TM) mixer in Pistachio.

To which I respond, I want to formally and publicly declare my love for this man in front of a lot of our friends, with a party, and food, and dancing, and a talent show and, yes, presents.

Is that what it all boils down to? I want to register? Or maybe I just want to make one of my - - keep the vomit down - - biggest dreams come true.

At the risk of being redundant, I'll say it again. I want a wedding. Pure and simple. Some people are fine with chianti in the living room, or elopements to Bora Bora, or a candlelit dinner for eight, or punch and cake in the Most Holy Name recreation room.

Me, I want a wedding. I've always wanted a wedding. Since I can remember. I want the vows, and the suits, and the hors d'oevres, and the dancing, and the cake, and the tears, and the laughs, and, yes, okay, the presents. Maybe even particularly the presents.

My conception of what that wedding would look like has transitioned over the years - - and continues to transition, sometimes bumpily, which M. will attest to, having suffered through more than his share of shocked and defensive responses to his insinuation that I, me, Groomzilla!, would have ever even considered a traditional white wedding with roses and mother-of-the-groom dancing and cutting-of-cake and a spotlight song by Celine Dion or maybe Michael Bolton - - but the basic premise has remained the same.

I'm getting married, having a wedding, because I want to get married and have a wedding. And because I have a boyfriend who is nice enough to humor me through some of it, even when it makes his blood run a little frigid. And because it is my inalienable right to do so, or at least it should be. Everyone should have the freedom to publicly - - perhaps even legally - - declare their love, the freedom to throw a big party, the freedom to register.

Some of won't make use of that freedom, and that's okay, too. But some of us have far too great of an urge to stand up and bare our hearts in front of a hundred people, far too great an urge to plan and design and perfect, to play hostess, to choose flatware, to cut cake, far too much innate compulsion to do all of these things that not ever doing them would be akin to not ever fully breathing oxygen or feeling sunlight or being alive.

Given all of the above, I, for one - - having held my veil to the side, arched my pearl-buttoned spine, and tossed my bouquet into the crowd - - will certainly not be looking back.

Except to steal one last glance at my new Kitchen-Aid (TM) mixer in Pistachio sitting on the gift table.