Wedding Throwdown: Mormons vs. Those Other Guys

So much has been written about the American Wedding that I'm not sure I've got anything of substance to add. Still, there's something about attending a wedding that makes a person want to psychoanalyze the state of American life and its unions in particular. Yesterday, Nate and I attended the wedding of Nate's cousin, Laila. Nate's uncle, Brian, is the freewheeler of his family, having defied his more traditional father's wishes on more than one occasion: he went to Harvard instead of MIT, majored in English instead of a "man's field" like engineering, he plays the sitar professionally and is married to Shubha, the only professional female surbahar player in the U.S. Laila is his adopted daughter with his first wife, Sandra, and their only child at all, so naturally the event of her marriage needed to be a grand affair.

And grand it was. I wore adult shoes (3-inch heels), ate adult food (caviar and expensive imported cheeses), had adult conversations ("Oh yes, Princeton is a lovely little town"), and did some very unadult dancing (I shook it to "Mony Mony", but declined to do the macarena). On separate occasions, Nate and I each got hit on (his bailed when she found out he was married, mine already knew I was married and waited until Nate had left to break out his line). I declined to have my champagne glass filled several times until an exasperated waiter went ahead and filled it anyway (when I tried to tell him no while he was filling it, he just leered at me).

I've had the privilege of attending the nuptial ceremonies of several major religions: Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Mormon (both in and out of the temple) and I've concluded that the Mormons are the most efficient. Most of the time, while the officiator might make a little five to ten minute speech about why marriage is a good thing, it's still just a quick "Do you?" and "Do you?" affair. All these recitations of poems, singing of singers, ceremonial hand-wrapping and/or glass crushing, etc., these don't make it into the Mormon wedding. As a Mormon, therefore, you can feel a bit cheated. That's why the Utah "Wedding Breakfast" was invented, to smash all that stuff back in. In fact, while the Mormon wedding is the most efficient, the Mormon wedding day is usually the longest. Most Mormons get married in the morning, then there's a wedding breakfast, afternoon pictures at the marriage site and at the reception site, and at least one wedding reception in the evening. Mormons can't get over the need to be efficient, though, so unlike the demure sit-down $100-a-head dinner of most wedding receptions, Mormons invite everyone they know (and everyone else they know) to bring a present, walk quickly through a receiving line of bride, groom, and close relatives, then sit at a table for another ten minutes eating mints and drinking sprite mixed with sherbet before feeling compelled to go home in order to free up their seat for someone else. The efficiency level increases as the servers are usually young women from your ward, the platers are relief society members, and the reception site is most likely to be the cultural hall of your ward building, with the receiving line posted under a rented trellis by the basketball hoop.

I suspect it's because with most Mormon families having a multitude of children and with a large population of young adults getting home from their missions all the same time, the procession of weddings in a town with a high Mormon population can get to be a little overwhelming. There are always wedding reception invitations on my parents' countertop whenever we visit them in Utah and the lucky couples are usually the child of someone my parents knew from something, however briefly. "Who's this, Mom?" "Oh, that's the daughter of the woman I stood next to in line at the supermarket." Knowing you only have to go for a few minutes to say hello, then devour your mints and take off enables you to attend four or five weddings in a week. Of course, the gift-giving can get a little prohibitive, but only family and close friends are expected to give actual presents. The 500+ additional reception invitees can usually drop a few bucks in a collective fund for the bride and groom to buy themselves a nice couch. The system is well-established.

Nate and I took the Mormon wedding efficiency one step further by squashing the wedding breakfast and reception into a single event (we ate breakfast with family and friends upstairs at our reception hall, then went downstairs afterwards to start greeting additional guests). We gave our poor photographer a bit of a heart attack, since there was so set picture-taking time--he was forced to follow us around at our reception (efficiency decrease: we didn't have a receiving line), waiting until we stopped talking to people, then dragging us out to snap as many pictures as he could before we escaped again. The whole thing was over by two in the afternoon. Frankly, most of it is a wonderful blur. Two events stick out in my mind: 1) seeing Nate for the first time after our temple ceremony, flanked by his brothers and decked out in his Scottish finest (Nate's ancestors on his mother's side are Stewart Scots). My heart nearly popped out of my chest, and 2) Nate pulling a sword out of his belt for me to cut the cake (and getting to lick the frosting off the sword tip to the appreciative yells of the crowd).

I wouldn't presume to say which wedding style is better: Mormon efficiency vs. Everyone Else opulence. The opulence, frankly, is more fun and when yours is the only immediate wedding in town, you get a little more attention for it. The party is louder and goes longer--and the food is far better. There are first dances and toasts (Mormon weddings, lacking alcohol, also lack the drunken friend salutes that make most weddings so entertaining), multiple courses and wedding singers. The Catholics in particular get to have an entire worship event, audience participation included, to go along with the wedding itself. The length of the ritual begins to wind itself tightly with power, culminating in the well-known recitation of vows that, by their very familiarity, seems to unleash a collective feeling of spiritual joy. There is something wonderful to be said about spending half a day really feting someone you love as they start into a completely new chapter of their life, combining your collective good wishes into a foundation for their marriage which will largely have to continue without your help.

Mormon efficiency is a cultural thing--in Utah, we have made efficiency into a worship art. However, Mormon wedding efficiency has its own unique origin, tied to the same reason most Mormon engagements are so short:

We're anxious to get to the hotel.