The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
Reader, I ED MARRI T H EM!
US novelist Emma Straub was overjoyed when her close friends asked her to officiate their wedding. She explains how playing such a key part in the ceremony has deepened their friendship
Ishould have known I was doing something wrong when the wedding planner started waving at me from the back of the crowd. It was not the wave of an excited reveller, but of a person who is witnessing the approach of a tsunami and is trying to save as many people as she can. It took a few more minutes (three paragraphs into my hilarious, touching opening remarks) for me to realise why. I had started the ceremony without the bride. How, exactly, did I get here?
Lots of my friends in the US have been married by civilians, by their college roommates, big sisters or favourite uncles. Maybe it’s that I run in a particularly godless crowd, but my friends are more likely to get someone they know to do the deed than find a rent-a-rabbi or a humourless judge at City Hall. It is ridiculously easy to get ordained to marry: there’s an internet church, which I’m sure exists only to make $80 from people like me 50 times a day. You sign up and five minutes later, voilà! You’re official. And so here I was at the wedding of my close friends Ben and Jess, a moment in the marital spotlight that I had long fantasised about.
In New York City, where I live, the only other legal hurdle is going to City Hall and signing a grand leather book, which looks like one Dumbledore would have in his office at Hogwarts. And I was very ready to sign my name. I am outgoing enough to have felt slightly miffed at never being asked in the past. I can read a poem! I can make a poignant speech. But one doesn’t advertise these things. It seems rather gauche to petition your happily dating friends to be their wedding officiant. So I waited patiently.
My husband and I had been friends with Ben and Jen for a few years. We had dinner dates and movie dates and I loved them both. When Ben called me one night out of the blue, it was odd – he usually called my husband. Our conversation felt like being asked out on a date; there was stammering, blushing and giggling. He asked if I would marry them, and I said yes. At last! (My husband would have been a good choice, too, but his record is blemished: he was best man at a friend’s first and second wedding and made a speech that the second bride’s family was not entirely amused by. I was a safer bet.)
I was pregnant at the time, and I did some quick maths. I would have a very new baby – three months old – when they planned to get married. It was my second child so I knew the challenges that a new baby brings, but this one was still
It was glorious. Forget front-row seats – this was a backstage pass
totally theoretical and therefore easier to ignore. I started reading strangers’ vows online, and went on a poetry binge. (In the end, I went with a Mary Oliver poem and included vows about feeding each other, as Ben is a butcher and they both care deeply about food.) I think couples often choose a pal to marry them because their families are more religious than they are or of different faiths. Ben and Jess are a mixed marriage religiously and I think that having someone like me to officiate helped skirt the issue with their parents. They didn’t have to choose sides – they chose me instead. It was not a job I took lightly. On our next double date (a road trip to a Taylor Swift concert, because we are serious adults), I asked Ben and Jess about their romantic histories, both together and previously. I wanted to know everything – after all, I was their priest/rabbi. Both Ben and Jess spilled gloriously: their first kisses and crushes, their weirdest sexual partners – the whole kit and caboodle, right up to falling in love with each other. Thank God the concert was in New Jersey, hours from home, because otherwise we would have needed half a dozen dinner dates to get through it all. I can’t say that I used much of it in the ceremony, but it did make me feel as though I knew them much better than I had before, which deepened the experience for all of us. The wedding took place on a farm, hours from anywhere. My husband drove down the night before, and baby and I flew the day of the wedding (my mother stayed behind with our toddler). Jess let me choose my outfit, and I went with a navy dress that made me feel like a priest, only with easy access for breastfeeding. I had my remarks neatly pasted into a pretty notebook. I had my cowboy boots on. I was ready. The baby was not. The groom and I hid inside a barn, both of us vibrating with excitement. His beautiful bride-to-be was inside a house across the way, waiting for her moment to process through the crowd. We bounced on our toes, full of anticipation. Outside,