Photograph by the ever-awesome Eric Steuer
A wedding is a big day.
It’s the joining of two people. It’s the joining of their friends and families, and their friend-families. It’s a piece of minor theater. It’s a party. And more.
So take a moment and breathe it in. Weddings don’t happen often, especially between two people with a community like this. Let’s all savor the moment, that we are here today, in Toronto, with these two, chosen to be part of their big day.
A wedding is also two things we don’t often think about when we think about weddings.
Since we’re a legal crowd it would be remiss to ignore that a wedding is, most formally, a contract.
It’s a contract between two people to fight together against the tides of the world. It’s a contract to push through the hard times. A contract to celebrate the good times. Because when pain is shared, it is diminished, and when joy is shared, it is increased. A marriage is an agreement to share as deeply as it’s possible to share. As Dorothy Parker once noted, it’s an agreement to sit amid bowers of neuroses, and match psychoses. Marriage shares everything.
Since we’re all kind of about sharing here, let’s recognize and honor that commitment to share.
But a marriage is also about forming a new entity – a “we” that gains legal status in a wedding. It’s a status that people have fought and died for the right to have. This moment, now, we are all graced with the chance to watch that “we” come into being.
And those of us here, and others scattered through the world who couldn’t make it? It is our job to help raise that new entity. Because that new “we” comes into the world needing support. And that is one of the reasons we’ve got this ritual, handed down through time, in which a community comes together to watch that “we” be born. Because it’s also up to us to hold Ryan, Kelsey, and their “we” up when they are down. To share their pain to diminish it, and to share their joy to increase it.
We’re part of the “we” – and we should take that obligation to Ryan and Kelsey just as seriously as they take their vows to one another.
And what a joyous obligation that is.