What's Your Vice and Wish?

There are many things that I am cynical about. Religion, familial relationships, mainstream culture, weathermen. I sort of enjoy it in a way. A sort of pathetic pride, verging on sad, that I think slightly different from other people. But then there's weddings.

I find myself fully in support of weddings, without a truly bad or sarcastic thing to say about them. I suppose it has a lot to do with being happy with who I married. Going on 3 years now, and I love her more than I ever have. Our wedding was beautiful, simple, and dare I say it, classy. But it's more than that.

I was at a friend of my wife's wedding last night, and during the first dance, I found myself choked up a bit. This is unusual for me. I don't really cry. When my father passed was really about the last time I cried. I don't enjoy doing it and I don't feel like it really accomplishes anything. But this came out of a single thought.

This is humanity at its finest.

That sounds a bit pat, I suppose, but really think about it. Everyone, from every culture, from every religion, every race, every nation, everywhere, believes in marriage on some level or another. Even those who do not believe in a deity of any sort, believe in marriage. Marriage is the purest expression of love that we can have here on Earth. We don't need a god for it, we don't need the government or permission from someone else. In marriage, we find ourselves truly independent from everything except for the person at the other end of the aisle. And in an instant, in the pronouncement, we find ourselves with our world changed, relying entirely on that person.

And thus we dance. Not because of the sexuality or the alcohol. But because of the celebration of human life at the highest point that we can ever hope to attain. We dance, and we scream, and we shout to the stars and the planets and the universe that we are human, we are filled with love, and by that we are free!

It is absolutely beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. It is a time when the boundaries between this world and others are thinnest, a time of beginnings and endings, and there the two are, together, at the center of this mighty flux of power, this true expression and celebration and veneration of the purest part of human nature.

Weddings... a summation of us at our best.