But who are they kidding anyway? People don´t fall in love with each other. They fall in love with themselves. A guy falls in love with a girl who laughs at his stupid jokes, which makes him feel intelligent and witty. A girl falls in love with a guy who constantly tells her how beautiful she is. Which makes her feel, well, beautiful. You fall for the one that makes you feel good about yourself.
A wedding is in three distinct stages. Firstly, there´s the ceremony. You sneak glances over at the girls on the other side, trying to determine who´s available and who´s not. The most pleasantly surprising thing about a wedding ceremony is how brief it is. The only time I´ve been to church so far was during confirmations and graduations, and they always seem to take forever. This is not because weddings are any more efficient than other ceremonies, it´s just that there are fewer people getting married at a time.
The ceremony over, we move over to phase two: the eating and the drinking. These happen to be two of my favourite activities, but there´s something uncomfortable about eating at weddings. Perhaps it’s the girliness of everything. The all-pervasive hearts, bells and flowers. I thought a wedding was supposed to be a union of two people. But everything around you seems to suggest that you´re entering their territory now. Perhaps you always were, as soon as you started to take an interest in them. How many guys do you know who´ve tried to become experts in poetry, in astrology, in any subject you can think of because it might conceivably appeal to girls? How many girls do you know of who memorise the names of football players to be able to hold a conversation with guys? The game is played on their terms from the start.
The man sitting next to me happened to have come up fourth in the strongest man in Iceland competition, which at least lent a little bit of masculinity to the proceedings. I almost felt like trying to take him, just to see if I could. But it was fairly obvious I couldn´t.
After the grub is disposed of, we move on to the third and final stage: the come-ons. Weddings are traditionally thought of as good places to pick up girls. First of all, the booze is free. “Can I get you a drink?” doesn’t entail financial expenditure. Nor is your prospects´ inebriation limited by your account size.
Secondly, chicks have a thing about weddings. You’re hoping for someone so desperate to get married she’ll throw herself into bed with anyone, and hopefully will have overcome her longing by the morning after.
But desperate means more desperate than yourself and that, I tell you, is hard to come by. I have a theory. If you sit down next to a girl for long enough, eventually she’ll be forced to respond. Mostly they do this by walking away. But every now and then, someone will say something like “Hi,” which is your cue to jump in. If only you knew more about astrology.
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