Elite Weddings

At least five times a day I wake my sleeping Toshiba laptop with a forceful press to its power button, open a new browser, and watch as The New York Times appears on my homepage. There it is, stamped in block letters and divided into subheadings: Opinion and Markets to your right, a big glossy photo-of-the-day smack-dab in the middle, and the Headlines You Must Read to the left. And every day, I glance at these important Headlines and Markets and Opinions in their ugly blue, but not quite dark-blue font, and I pretend to be interested in the world. Because having The NY Times on your homepage legitimizes your worldliness and raises your IQ by 10 points; you’re not the dummy that everyone thought you were.

But I read The New York Times for a different reason. I read it because… ugh, I like their Wedding Section.

To be honest, it’s a little hard for me to admit this to myself. I’m a fourth-year journalism student. I’m writing my thesis on journalism. Ask me about Iraq, and I should be able to tell you how many U.S. soldiers have died already and when we’re supposed to pull out our troops. (No clue.) And Obama, you ask? What’s he doing right now? (Well… he’s being presidential and doing his presidential duties….) Clearly, I am a useless. And it’s all because I don’t read the news. I read the Weddings/Celebrations Section.

Yeah, I know. I disgust myself too.

I was never the kind of girl to plan her wedding twenty years ahead of time. In fact, I thought all those girls were a little stupid, because who plans a wedding when they’re not getting married? What a waste of brainspace. But there’s something oddly satisfying about reading the story of the late Rockefeller’s greatgreatgreat grand daughter getting married to this also rich, but very humble guy. Their wedding looks like a fairytale and she’s wearing this simple, but elegant $5,000 gown that scoops low in the back. Vows are exchanged in a magical garden. Or on the beach. Or in a polished white tent. And it’s usually the same story: rich, educated boy meets rich, educated girl (for some reason these are the weddings they highlight) and they have a rich, extravagant wedding.

David Brooks, a writer for The New Yorker, called these kinds of folks the “New-Class Nuptials.” They’re unabashedly elitist with their fancy jobs, fancy schools, and fancy weddings. But it didn’t always used to be this way. Back in the ‘50s it was all about connections and ancestry, and you’d read sentences that made you feel like you were attending some debutante ball. Now a new elite class has formed—one that’s not based on ancestry, but rather on educational and career opportunities. They’ve all got some sort of nice undergraduate degree and a master’s or PhD to top their impressive resumes, and they’re getting married in their late 20s-mid 30s because they waited until their lives were in order before they tied the knot. The couples listed on the online version of the Times may be skin-tone diverse, but they’re all the same upper middle-class people raised in the safe part of town. You get a sense that these couples are smart, responsible adults—the kind of people you wouldn’t mind having over for dinner because they’re intelligent enough to hold a decent conversation, and sane enough to not whip out a machete and hack you to pieces over the mashed potatoes. They’re the kind of Americans who were made for dinner parties—who stop by Starbucks in the morning for a soy latte and surf the web on their Blackberry or iPhone while they’re taking the subway to work.

Call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing that Mr. Jack Cole here didn’t eat pot brownies and smoke whatever came in a cylinder back when he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Harvard. Yes, Harvard. And I have a feeling that Ms. Margaret Sampson used to visit dirty bars and scream at the top of her lungs when she got drunk before she became this high- profile consultant at Goldman Sachs who now works for underprivileged youth. Where are the real stories of real people? If Liz Cardel is on her second marriage, what happened to her first? Where’s the girl who got impregnated at the age of sixteen, kept her baby, and married the guy to please her parents? Where are the divorces, the affairs, and the people who marry for money? I doubt all these people in the online page of the Weddings/Celebrations section actually tie the knot for the sake of love.

So, Times, I’ll let you off the hook (and myself too). You can stick with your fairy-princess- happily-ever-after stories, but that’s only because I grew up watching Disney videocassettes and I still base my ideas of true love on Simba and Nala. I can’t help it if I enjoy the fraudulence For the few minutes it takes me to read a wedding story, I’m no longer in the library working on my thesis where I have to keep telling the guy sitting at my table for the umpteenth time to please stop typing so loudly. After I’ve finished reading the entire story of the couples’ lives and looked through each picture in their slideshow not once, but twice, the happy feeling begins to dissipate, quickly, at the rate that proteins catalyze. Because deepdeepdeepdown I know it’s all fake and the world is not as happy as the Times makes it to be; it’s never quite as glamorous. And then you’d think—after I’ve fed my inner lovesick girl —that I’d move on to read the news. The Real Stuff. About Iraq and Obama and North Korea’s scary dictator so I could become a real journalism student instead of a journalism student who fakes it….

But, instead, I move on to the Dining and Wine section.