your presence is our present

A few weeks ago I was at my desk listening to Taylor Swift’s Reputation and looking up for about the twelfth time whether Eras tour resale tickets were still the price of a downpayment on a house in Jesmond, and I wondered with very fleeting perverseness what would happen if I simply decided to get married next year on the weekend Taylor Swift is playing in Dublin, forcing my friends to choose. (I didn’t spend long wondering, because it’s a no-brainer: they would all choose Taylor, and rightly so.)

I tried to soothe the ache of not getting Eras tour tickets by mentally adding up what it would have cost me, tickets plus travel plus booking a hotel, and the resulting figure was not a million miles away from money I have been invited to spend on attending weddings and hen parties over the last few years, which only served to make me more irate.

I am sure many people would agree that having coveted Taylor Swift tickets is an entirely valid excuse to decline an invitation to a wedding, or wedding-adjacent events like hens/stags/the pre-wedding ritual sacrifice to the harvest gods. But I also think different people have different ideas about what constitutes a ‘valid’ excuse. I think it’s naive not to recognise that accepting such invitations is influenced by an enduring cultural sense of obligation to attend weddings, combined with a reluctance to talk frankly about money. We feel embarrassed about admitting we can’t afford to go, or we think it would seem uncaring to say that travelling to watch someone’s drunk boomer uncle thrash about to ‘Come on Eileen’ is not how we want to spend our money, or our weekend.

We instead arrange to fly back to our hometowns and travel to a wedding venue where the nearest village B&B was the site of a recent shooting and when you ask about local taxi services they just give you a mobile number and say ‘try Liam’. We continue to grit our teeth and shell out six hundred pounds to vomit in an escape room after bottomless brunch on day two of a four-day hen. We snark in group chats about the gall of being asked to travel to a destination wedding in Strasbourg and then afterwards share loving Instagram posts that say ‘thank you for letting me be a part of your special day; félicitations, ma cherie!’

I do sometimes think it would be funny to start behaving like other ‘special days’ should be treated with the same uncritical reverence as is often attached to weddings. Inviting your closest friends along for a boozy weekend in a Berlin Travelodge to celebrate getting the job you wanted, or circulating a gift registry in advance of completing your PhD. Being given a nice set of John Lewis wine glasses for my hardworking years of academic research is something I would personally find less ridiculous than being bestowed the same offering as a weird reward for deciding to put on a white dress and legally merge my assets with someone I fell into at my local pub; but maybe that’s just me.

When it comes to weddings, I don’t think reasons like ‘I can’t afford it’, or simply, ‘I don’t want to’ have been fully normalised yet. I think we still feel the pressure of needing a ‘valid’ excuse to not go—a pressure that isn’t necessarily exacted by those getting married, but that we should more openly acknowledge is there regardless. I promise that if I ever get married I will raise a toast to absent friends on my wedding day; whether you’re seeing Taylor Swift live in concert, or whether you’re under a blanket at home watching Miss Americana on Netflix. I respect you either way.

Cover photo by Tristan Gassert on Unsplash