The bride wore white, as a symbol of her virginity.
Her two daughters, by different men made wonderful bridesmaids, while her son, whose father was a different man again looked so cute in his page boy outfit.
The groom's children sat with their grandfather, who watched stony faced as the female celebrant bound his son to his second wife, for as long as it may last I guess, in a wedding venue decorated in the height of modern wedding kitsch.
I wasn't there, thank God, but some close to me were.
Here's the thing my friends getting married is (was?) a rite of passage. It did once mean that the participants were now ready to undertake the adult responsibilities of raising a family. Conception outside marriage was frowned upon - with good reason. Marriage was protective of both women and children. And it was good for men too - it gave them a reason to grow up and a purpose in life beyond satisfying their own immediate desires.
We live in a world where its meaning has been degraded down to meaninglessness, where two men or two women can essentially undergo the same or similar rituals in an exercise of sheer pointlessness.
It was once an undertaking of seriousness and marked with ceremony and decorum, though joyful, in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion.
Now it lasts just as long as one or other of the participants doesn't get bored and walk away.
And the consequences are dire - people who never grow up, hundreds of thousands of fatherless children, an epidemic of child abuse along with ever increasing numbers of prescriptions written out for anti-depressants.
To be sure this social upheaval has benefited some, well some perhaps, Jacinda Ardern, an immature 31 year old woman no doubt feels satisfied with her number four position on the Labour front bench - but she is a big nothing, an empty vessel, a woman-child.
Anyway for every "successful" upper middle class woman there are hundreds of lonely poor women struggling with sole parenthood. And there are also hundreds of lost and confused men whose role has been reduced to being "sperm donors" and checkbooks.
But they are the price that has to be price paid for the upper middle class to indulge in its whimsys I guess.
What's new the poor have always paid the cost for the sins of the rich.
Her two daughters, by different men made wonderful bridesmaids, while her son, whose father was a different man again looked so cute in his page boy outfit.
The groom's children sat with their grandfather, who watched stony faced as the female celebrant bound his son to his second wife, for as long as it may last I guess, in a wedding venue decorated in the height of modern wedding kitsch.
I wasn't there, thank God, but some close to me were.
Here's the thing my friends getting married is (was?) a rite of passage. It did once mean that the participants were now ready to undertake the adult responsibilities of raising a family. Conception outside marriage was frowned upon - with good reason. Marriage was protective of both women and children. And it was good for men too - it gave them a reason to grow up and a purpose in life beyond satisfying their own immediate desires.
We live in a world where its meaning has been degraded down to meaninglessness, where two men or two women can essentially undergo the same or similar rituals in an exercise of sheer pointlessness.
It was once an undertaking of seriousness and marked with ceremony and decorum, though joyful, in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion.
Now it lasts just as long as one or other of the participants doesn't get bored and walk away.
And the consequences are dire - people who never grow up, hundreds of thousands of fatherless children, an epidemic of child abuse along with ever increasing numbers of prescriptions written out for anti-depressants.
To be sure this social upheaval has benefited some, well some perhaps, Jacinda Ardern, an immature 31 year old woman no doubt feels satisfied with her number four position on the Labour front bench - but she is a big nothing, an empty vessel, a woman-child.
Anyway for every "successful" upper middle class woman there are hundreds of lonely poor women struggling with sole parenthood. And there are also hundreds of lost and confused men whose role has been reduced to being "sperm donors" and checkbooks.
But they are the price that has to be price paid for the upper middle class to indulge in its whimsys I guess.
What's new the poor have always paid the cost for the sins of the rich.