SWA #10, Essay 2 Intro (Imitation of Klosterman’s Appetite for Replication)

This woman is pissed.
She is not peeved or irritated; she is filled with bloodthirsty rage. This is strange considering the fact that she is wearing a lovely wedding dress. One usually assumes a bride on her wedding day is supposed to be transcendently content. And two hours and nineteen minutes later, this woman does appear happy, but right now in Tampa Bay, Florida at 3:11 P.M. on Sunday afternoon, this woman may as well be a Viking approaching a foe with a freshly sharpened axe.
“Are you a complete moron?” inquires the blushing (or rather fuming) bride of her stunned husband to be. “I specifically told you to order the chicken without the peanuts seeing as most of my family is allergic to peanuts including myself. Do you care nothing about this wedding? Should I even be marrying such a thoughtless dick? Our wedding is in a few hours and now we have nothing to feed our guests. This is awful you have ruined this wedding.”
“She doesn’t mean to be so cruel she is just worried,” he says to me as I pat the poor bastard on the back. “The poor girl just takes this wedding business too seriously; she will come to her senses.”
My cousin Ryan (the groom) smiles in spite of the verbal beating he just took. I described his bride as a Viking but in reality he is the giant standing at six foot three and two hundred and twenty pounds. He looks like a giant bouncer you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley (or even a well lit alley for that matter). The man is a gentle giant though who said, “Initially I was against the idea of a big wedding but the more she talked about it the more I realized the wedding is not about what I want. I’m just along for the ride and I happen to be sitting next to this lovely woman who may at any moment embrace me or strike me. At least it won’t be a dull trip.”
I feel as if I am the only person questioning the purpose of this ceremony. As I look around at my family and the people who will soon be part of my family I feel as if I am the only person missing the point about what a wedding is supposed to be . My grandmother is simply amazed at “just how beautiful weddings are” while my uncle exclaims “FREE BAR! Maybe coming to this wedding was not such a horrible idea.” The bride’s grandfather Jonathan sits alone muttering to himself and anyone who will listen (only me) about how the bride and groom will not last long because his granddaughter told him her husband to be saw her in her wedding dress before the wedding day. This is apparently a cardinal sin of weddings. While Jonathan is convinced the marriage won’t last one of the bride’s maids named Jennifer is practically in tears exclaiming, “Ryan and Emily are so happy together I cannot even imagine them not being together.”
What is the purpose of the wedding ceremony? I am not questioning the idea of marriage just the pompous pageantry that is the wedding which seems to be a mandatory part of beginning a marriage. It seems as though the purpose of the wedding is not to express and celebrate love but more to prove to the bride and groom just how serious they are about marriage.