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Marriage à la Mode

Why the cake remains an essential ingredient.

Feb 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21 • By CHARLOTTE HAYS
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Miss Manners’s Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding
by Jacobina Martin
and Judith Martin
Norton, 320 pp., $24.95

Why a “surprisingly” dignified wedding? Well, because weddings—unlike funerals, which are impromptu by nature and therefore less likely to become vulgar extravaganzas—have come to resemble Oscar night performances rather than mere gatherings of friends and family to witness and celebrate an important moment in a couple’s life.

This points to another way in which funerals are superior to weddings: A funeral is forever, a wedding is not. The decline of marriage, ironically, has been a boon for wedding planners: The bride may not be married forever, so why not make a day of it? Miss Manners notes that the contemporary bride thinks of her wedding as “my day” and is likely to demand a limousine (“there is no polite word for distinguishing pretentious automobiles from ordinary ones”), insist upon a dozen bridesmaids in hideous dresses of her devising, and devise a theme right out of Hollywood. Bad ideas all: “Don’t worry about developing a ‘theme’ for your wedding,” cautions Miss Manners. “The theme of a wedding is marriage.” 

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