Marriage never gets old

And neither do the widows, widowers, divorces, and divorcees who find themselves in the pages of the New York Times wedding announcements. This little number might just take the wedding cake for the oldest bride and groom on top of it, and the most-emailed list. It pulled the rare coup and beat the Vows column (usually the only one with a shot of winning that popularity contest). So what makes this story rise above the rest? Is it their financial and political connections (she’s the mother-in-law of a financier, he’s the former ambassador to Canada). In a world where marriages have only a fifty percent chance of ending up like this, it’s nice to imagine that the last chance for finding a right person doesn’t end when most marriages do.  Heck, if you make it to 85 or 90, you deserve a second, third, fourth shot at love. Email me stories like this any day.

I wish for them a good credit score and other advice from parents and exes

I’ve often talked about the missing perspective of the oft mentioned “significant other” who seemingly stepped aside willingly to pave the way for a New York Times wedding announcement worthy romance.  Finally, in this week’s vows column, we get to hear that voice. Or, at least, the author thought to check in with the groom’s ex, who was ditched for a light-saber wielding cellist and got invited to their wedding four years later.

And it sounds like she really does mean it when she tells the writer that she “saw the ‘rightness’ of this union” and “wants to be involved in their whatever, forever.” If I were the bride, I might be slightly creeped out by this, and as a reader I wonder how much credit to give what shows up between quotation marks of scorned exes (hey, at least it’s more romantic than her mother wishing them a good credit score) but if the words ring true and represent the genuine, it’s a remarkable shift in momentum and their union seems “righter” for it.  Maybe check-ins with exes invited to weddings make better, more complete announcements? A new institutional practice, however? I think the jury’s still out.

Playing Hardball with Singalongs

This week’s Vows column describes a seemingly normal tale of collegiate romance grown up into the real world. That is until we discover that the star-crossed lovers are no other than the son of Hardball’s Chris Matthews and South Carolina State Senator so famous for his Republican politics that they named a bridge after him. Moderate celebrities, especially political ones, and their scions are nothing new to the New York Times wedding announcements. And when politics are everywhere these days, a union of two political families is nothing to write home about. That’s when I clicked on this.  Aside from the serenade at the beginning and the baby talk at the end, the couple is genuinely likable. It got me wondering, who decided that singing your wedding song at the beginning of your announcement video is a good idea?  I mean, if it were me in that video, I think I’d rather not be remembered for my slightly off-key version of a love song. Do the reporters inflict his upon us or do couples decide that this is the right idea? To drown out the singing, I’d rather watch a time traveling romance unfold between Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. Sometimes, wedding announcements are best served with the Encore Love channel.

What’s under the green umbrella? Why, it’s NYT’s first (?) gay kiss!

Someday, when I have hours to look into it, I’m going to find out if this Sunday’s wedding announcement video features the first, though somewhat foggy, gay kiss in New York Times wedding announcement. At the end of the rainbow for these two Harvard Dems is a lifetime of wedded bliss and cookies and gives us the first gay kiss I can recall in this medium. Media milestone (?) or not, their lively romance is memorable at the very least for its cookies and green umbrellas and even more for the genuine affection.

P.S. Media milestone it isn’t, but this week’s vows couple is amazing. Love it.

Sunday Pick Me Up: A Seventh Grade Romance Ends Up at the Altar Fifty Years Later

In the grand scheme of pick me ups, this one is a major winner. In love way too young, the first run of this couple‘s romance ended when she went off to college. But after his wife’s death and her divorce, they found each other on Facebook (too amazing for words) and they started just where they’d left off – except this time they weren’t going anywhere.

Public Service is So Hot Right Now

So hot it’s in the New York Times Wedding Announcements, in fact. The New York Times has never been shy about tailoring its announcements to current events – it’s a remarkably good and interesting way to spread the news to a varied audience. I’m not saying that the average wedding announcement reader doesn’t stay abreast of the latest news in Haiti but reading about what happens when you devote your life to, say, providing medical care to Haitians, or, teaching children in the Dominican Republic, makes those who do choose those paths, much more accessible. This week’s Vows column focused on the wedding of two medical students, one who worked as the Chief Administrative Officer for the field hospital of Project Medishare - a collaboration between the bride’s university and Haiti’s Ministry of Health.  The announcement itself served two purposes in promoting public service: 1) it wants you to believe that doing good brings you good – a loving partner with a similar motivation to do good, a piece in the New York Times covering some of your life’s work, and a wedding announcement dedicated to your unique love and 2) helps promote the news and, particularly, the situation in Haiti, in a new and interesting way.

Cross-referencing the news is nothing new, but I think here it could very well serve to model itself in a new way. The New York Times wedding announcements exhibit those who many want to emulate – the wealthy in love and often the just plain wealthy. Maybe in its exhibition of public service (again exemplified in this wedding announcement where a Peace Corps volunteer who met her husband in the Dominican Republic), the New York Times is setting an example for its readers of a different kind – the kind that tries to look out for someone else.

A small note on the above: I’ve never necessarily been a fan of outsiders riding in on a white horses to try and solve the rest of the world’s problems, unless those rides are in partnership with locals. But, especially, in the case of a situation as severe as that in Haiti, that willingness to try is not only helpful, it may be lifesaving. And whether it’s the stories of loss and devastation or a New York Times love story that motivates action, whatever that may be, it’s always worth it to try. If the New York Times wedding announcements can bring awareness to public service, especially in a place where the situation is so dire, then maybe it’s doing its part just as well.

The length of love

That’s what she said, certainly, but a few weeks ago, a good friend, and fellow New York Times reader, sent me this article chronicling the life of a writer-bachelor who decided to explore the nature of love and write a book about it (kudos on the promotion here, NYTimes, I ran out for the book after I whipped through the article). To get his book, he asked a whole bunch of Americans to answer one simple question: “who do you love the most?” The answers are as varied as you would expect, since Bowe and his fellow conspirators attempted to get the best cross-section of America they could. The book, lauded by hipster/”I love you man” icons Ira Glass and Judd Apatow, is, coming from someone who has a blog about the New York Times wedding announcements, pretty awesome – like longer wedding announcements except they don’t always end happily. Both heartbreaking and heartwarming, they do what the best announcements do each and every time: give you something real.

Anyway, if this is your thing, pick up the book. It’s a worthwhile read. My point of this post, at least my intended point, was to wax on whether the extra length of each essay really enriches the telling of a love story. While I enjoy reading between the lines in the wedding announcements, I often find myself wanting to hear about the gut-wrenching, gut-checking ups and downs of real life that every love story has embedded in it.  The stories in this book give you all of that. It isn’t always the simple snapshot of a happy ending but, most of the time, the reality of the extended tale is even better.