As the lovers spoke their vows, I watched a young woman in a cerise dress sitting in the congregation in front of me. She was lost in their story, her mouth agape, her eyes swimming with its romance. Then, oddly, her face fell from rapture to a sadness edging on tears.
The groom said he had found it hard to cook when his bride wasn’t there to inspire the meal, and couldn’t tell if what he had made was tasty or not – a confusion that was mirrored in every part of his life when she wasn’t around. The bride said that sometimes she didn’t know where she ended and he began. When he spoke she understood herself better, she said.
Their vows effortlessly said the things songwriters bleed to say. They raised a kind of amorous fable wherein commuting princes and track-suited beauties are helplessly drawn to each other. Their psyches and dreams were strands of a helix, entangled, indivisible, until D do us P.
Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) and Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
It was an archetypal story, the kind that makes us aware we are not whole – that’s why the world hurts, we are not whole. And if somewhere out there is a transforming love to make us whole, then we’re willing to board any leaky boat or gimp-winged plane to get there – take any risk, wait as long as we must, for that one.
But the better your vows are the more shade they throw on the imperfect romantic realities of your congregation. Listening to descriptions of all-embracing love, a wedding guest might become aware of the absences in their own. And sitting in the congregation, the young woman in the cerise dress was not only marvelling at the marrying couple’s reciprocated adoration, she was hearing and tallying the deficits in her own affair de coeur.
“Does my heart flutter when Harry’s key hits the lock at the end of the day? Can I taste my food when he’s not around? When Harry speaks, do I understand myself better? No? I am not Eurydice, then. Nor is Harry Orpheus. He won’t come to me in the underworld and beseech Hades for my release. He’s neither Mr Darcy nor Heathcliff. I’m neither Elizabeth nor Cathy.”
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It’s a powerful feat of authorship to have your wedding vows open others up to the timidity of their own romance and make them want to ditch their lover and risk the field. It must make you feel like a Beatle or a Bard. And guilty too, that your perfect declarations, made in keenest timbre from deepest heart, turned out to be a pitiless searchlight sweeping over your congregation, illuminating the ignoble compromises that make up their marriages and the regret and indifference infecting them.
We are all belittled, to a greater or lesser degree, by perfection. Who have you inadvertently awakened to doubt among these, your dearest people, this congregation, these ranks of beloved mentors, callow confidantes, regretful exes, ex-crewmates, ex-housemates, ingrate siblings and inchoate in-laws?
