Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.
THE best types of weddings to get invited to, the uninhibited bachelor soon realizes, is one where you’re no longer very close with the person or persons inviting you. Obviously some remnant of affection or intimacy or whatever remains to get you invited in the first place, but if his first response to the invitation is surprise, the enterprising bachelor knows he’s onto something.
When my friend Deidre (not her real name) invited me to her wedding, it was perfect. I was not close enough to be intimately involved with the plans, had met the groom once (and that in a crowded smoky place where I was pretty sure he would never remember me from) and knew only a limited number of her other close friends. The reason this was exciting was simple: weddings are filled with drunken, relaxed women in tight, revealing but uncomfortable clothes who have been whipped up into a mating frenzy by the sheer romance and primal proceative mood of the ceremony. After a few too many glasses of white wine and just the right number of love songs, any man with no perceivable limps or skin diseases starts to look attractive, as long as he seems like marriage-material.
“Marriage Material” is a tricky term which means, basically, that there is no reason the poor slob couldn’t be goaded into exchanging vows should a relationship blossom and the idea of living with him and bearing his children not bring images of prescription drugs dancing into the poor gal’s head. Not all men fall into this category, for a variety of reasons: the limps and skin diseases mentioned above, an existing marriage, baleful personality, halitosis, and an alarmingly long list of character defects that range from a wandering dick to an inability to stand up to her father. The exact prerequisites of “Marriage-Material” vary from girl to girl, and are difficult to pin down, but every lean and hungry bachelor knows that he has to look it to have any chance of being the real Best Man of the reception.
There are two ways to acquire this mysterious veneer.
The first is to do whatever is necessary to appear honestly distressed at your single status, to achieve a delicate balance of machismo and sensitivity, to try and project the sort of manly sadness stemming from your loneliness that will set women’s hearts a-pounding and knees a-melting and make you look like the third-rate Chris O’Donnel sensitive hunk you know you could be.
The other, more attractive to the lazy amongst us bachelors, is simply to show up with a good Trophy Date and not tell anyone she’s your platonic friend or your best friend’s sister or your cousin Ruth. Because the one true law of “Marriage Material” is that if some other woman is willing to appear in public as your girlfriend, you must be it.
I asked my gorgeous friend and confidant Simone [REDACTED] to be my trophy date for this one, for a variety of reasons: she can drink like a sailor, she’s a good choice of people to talk to for hours and hours, and she’s good-looking enough to blind when the mood takes her to wear skintight black evening dresses. Also, since Simone regards my own libido as an amusing if unimportant detail of my existence, there was no chance of me losing sight of my real objectives and getting distracted. She was perfect for Trophy Date status.
I was ready. With the lovely Ms. [REDACTED] on my arm and my own dashing lack of any discernible deformities, I knew I had Marriage-Material stamped on my forehead.
And then, we got lost.
And I mean, lost. We got lost on the way to the ceremony, although not too badly, and managed to sneak in with only a deafening-amount of squeaking hinges and muffled giggles. Then we got lost on the way to the reception, in a big way. Well, in all honesty I should say that I got lost. Simone just sort of sat in the front seat staring out the window in a saintly display of tolerance. But then Simone’s known me for years now and if she hasn’t come to terms with my general incompetence by now then she never will.
Being lost in New Jersey, however, means never being too far away from a major highway, and we did make it to the last half hour of the cocktail hour after being on the road for almost four hours. We were starving, and all the food had been gnawed down to the bones by the other guests, who resembled army-ants or piranhas in their greasy-lipped frenzy. I settled for a stiff cocktail and some sushi, while Simone trembled and wept because all the good foods had been devoured. I held her gently in my arms as she cried, forlorn at the lost hors devours.
At the actual reception, we were both so burned from the ride down that it took many glasses of liquor before we felt relaxed enough to enjoy ourselves, and by then I suppose I had lost my appetite for meaningless romantic entanglements with booze-flushed floozies in the coat room. Besides, my pickings were slim: the women at our table (the official “old friends we don’t know what to do with” table) were vague little sorority moppets more interested in discussing the details of every wedding they’d ever seen, heard of, or imagined in their narrow lives, and none of the other women were drinking enough. So I settled in, talked to Simone, snuck out with her to watch Game 4 of the World Series on the Hotel Lounge TV, and eventually got shit-faced enough to dance.
And there my careful veneer of Marriage-Material vanished, like ice on a July afternoon.
Dancing is not a male activity. Men who dance well are not men (although men who avoid dancing are cowards) and so most of us flail about with an unseemly awkward motion, endangering our friends and dates and ruining our cool exteriors. In self-defense, most sensible men have adopted a sedate white-man’s overbite type of dancing that is neither exciting nor embarrassing, it is simply dull. Not me. In my self-defense, I get as goofy as I can, dancing as if I were in a Bill Murray movie. I make my dancing into a big joke. This is fine if you’re dancing in front of good friends who already don’t respect you, but in front of strangers…sometimes it is a mistake. I am the Elaine Bennis of Male Pattern Dancing.
It didn’t matter, really; we had a good time and made it up to our room after several hours of dancing had sweated all the alcohol out of my body. Luckily, I was too tired to be humiliated and hit the sheets immediately upon entering the room. Simone unfortunately changed into frumpy sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the next day I happily drank coffee, clogged the tub drain, and ate a complimentary breakfast of greasy sausages and buttery eggs…
…and promptly got lost on the way home. Simone, tired of all this bullshit finally took charge and directed me home. As I dropped her off I considered the whole night to have been a rousing success, even if I had wasted a great Trophy Date opportunity. Oh well, one thing I know in this crazy life: there is always another wedding waiting for me.