The Season is Coming

                It’s coming. I thought it was all over but it’s coming back. I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about it again. But now, this summer is filled with them. Wedding Season is coming.

                The horror. The horror. I really did think that it might be a very long time until the next family wedding event, but I was wrong. This summer there are at least three weddings taking place and I’m planning on going to at least two of them. I think. I have to take another look at the calendar. Regardless of the number of weddings this season I am once again thrust into the lonely and often terrible world of trying to find a wedding date who is both fun and will put up with the majority of my nonsense for at least one evening.

                It’s a living hell trying to find a wedding date. “Why not just go alone,” you might ask. Well, I’ve done that too and it’s boring as all get out. It’s a real hell to watch couple after couple dance, walk in together, sit together, be mildly adorable together while I just stand very close to the bar hoping there’s a cute waitress I can sweep up off her feet. However the only date I usually wind up with is Ginger, with whiskey.  

                Going to weddings alone was at one time a rite of passage because the odds there was a young woman also there on her own were pretty good.  There’s a time tested wedding hook-up tradition involving mating rituals, dancing and imbibing on copious amounts of cocktails. Those were the days when going stag to a wedding was considered acceptable; even if the morning after brunch was a little awkward.  It is a tradition that has stood the test of time in nearly every wedding related Hollywood movie about weddings.  I can’t say this ever happened for me but there was always the potential.

                Now though, as youthful dalliances are clouded with time and gray hairs, the chances of meeting another single young lady are slim to fat, whichever one is worse.  (Fat Chance? Slim Chance? Both seem right…). So going to a wedding alone can be a little tough on the old ego.  You certainly feel too old for those young women that are indeed there by themselves and you’re not attractive enough in the regular world to even get a date in the first place.  So your ego and self-worth certainly feel like Napoleon in a room of Andre the Giants.   

                The weddings I have been too recently, the married people and committed couples have certainly outnumbered the single people by a hilariously wide margin. I think the last time there was a garter toss I think there was me, six boys under the age of seven and someone who wandered in from the Persian wedding next door vying for the garter. I literally just let it fall to the ground as the six boys under seven wrestled each other for it. The Persian guy had been escorted back to his own party after complaining about the lamb.

                The ratio of single guys to single girls at a wedding has become dismal. At my age, most of the women I’d even want to ask to be my wedding date are in committed relationships or married or have expressed their overwhelming disgust for me when I’ve previously asked them to be my date.  So the pickings are slim. That’s not meant to be a demeaning statement either. It’s rather literal in my case. It’s just at a certain age, the availability and overall willingness of women to be a wedding date is diminished.

                So it’s hard to face another summer season of Weddings alone. I might as well call it rejection season, but calling every day of my bachelor life a season would be wrong.  It’s already lonely enough so there’s nothing like the added pressure of finding someone who you like and enjoy spending time with, who likes you enough to spend a whole evening with you too. No pressure there at all.

                It isn’t anyone’s fault of course. It’s just how it goes. I do not begrudge anyone the happiness they have found with that special someone and I’m excited to celebrate it with them.  I suppose I’m a little jealous of them and their happiness. Yet I don’t blame them. I only wish I could be the guy who finally had a wedding date and then the same date for all the weddings I have to go to for the rest of my days.