Wedding Woes September 10, 2008

Okay, I’m 31. And single. And invited to three – THREE! – weddings in six weeks. To me, there is only one thing more hellish than enduring the bouquet toss at a wedding (which was thankfully avoided at the last wedding I attended – I don’t think the bouquet was thrown at all… unless it was well after midnight!) and that’s shopping for the wedding present.

Now, it’s not because I HATE shopping (I do), or that I’m cheap (I am), it’s not even the whole “picka gift that the couple have already picked for themselves but didn’t buy” thing (and really, I beg to differ on calling a wedding gift a “gift” because a gift is something the giver chooses for the receiver, not something the receiver has already chosen and has given the giver the ‘honour’ of paying for… because really, that’s not a gift. That’s a list of requirements in order to attend the wedding. Almost like a ticket – except in a much more tangible form. Anyway, back to it…).

The reason I hate wedding gift shopping is that it’s all lumped in one place in a department store (which seems to be the most popular place to register) and while wandering around, peering at a registry list and trying not to be bitter about the fact that I’m expected to spend a lot of money to celebrate the fact that my friends are marrying and I’m STILL BLOODY SINGLE (ooh, more on that later), I also get the added joy of seeing OTHER happy couples wandering around, compiling their OWN wedding registries. So I, the bitter, utterly, depressingly single SPINSTER get to wander in a store and try to feel happy about parting with a large chunk of my hard-won money, as well as feel happy for everyone else in the WORLD because THEY’RE all getting married. And are walking hand-in-hand through Chinaware and bloody glowing with ecstatic togetherness. Honestly, it makes my teeth ache.

I hate being single. Not that that’s any kind of surprise, I’m sure. In fact, my total horror at the idea of going to my friends’ wedding as the ONLY SINGLE PERSON (no joke! I asked the couple if there would be any single guys there for me, and they told me that I was the ONLY person going to the wedding without a date! Honest! How statistically strange is that?!) prompted me to ask a male friend to come to the wedding with me as my “safety date”. I mean, who hasn’t ever had to bring a safety date to a function, if only to ensure that you had someone to talk to?

Anyway, apparently my bringing a date is hysterical to practically everyone I know. I told my mother at the last family wedding (over the long weekend), and within about 10 minutes, every female cousin I have was upon me, demanding to know “who’s this ‘friend’ of yours, hmmm?” Even my Father wanted to know about this guy! And no matter how much I told everyone that he’s JUST a friend (I’ve known him for like five years!), they all insisted that it must mean more.

Then came the Bachelorette party last weekend. Once again, there were women crowding around me, demanding to know about my ‘friend’. Arrgghhh! I KNOW that apparently, it’s impossible to believe that someone would willingly date me (judging from the responses), but does everyone have to be so VOCAL about their disbelief? Christ! And considering my safety date gets kind of squirrely whenever someone assumes we’re dating (it’s happened a couple of times – like I said, we’ve known each other for a long time), I think that this wedding might turn out to be a bit uncomfortable. I’ve already warned him that he should have his “we’re just friends” speech ready… I just hope that my friends don’t make such a big deal out of this safety date that it starts to make me look pathetic to the other people at the wedding. Sigh.