Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”

I hate weddings.

It all started, as it does for so many string players, with Canon in D. While the violin part is certainly less mind-numbing than the cello line, it was impossible to live through dozens of wedding gigs in high school and college without developing some distaste for Pachelbel’s greatest hit. It’s not an objectively bad piece—it can even sound festive and energetic with a peppy tempo and period instruments. But that’s not the version you get at weddings, where you’re likely in for a soupy, schmaltzy rendition, the tempo slowing to accommodate the always-unpredictable pace of bridal party gaits.

The rest of the go-to wedding music catalog (mostly other deathly slow baroque numbers) isn’t much better. Nor is mashing up Canon in D with a Taylor Swift song in order to “do something a bit unique, like on Bridgerton.”

Then there’s the theological issues. Your average wedding ceremony, whether explicitly Christian or not, is shot through with patriarchal symbolism and heteronormative ideas about love, humanity, and God. The two [sic] genders are divided up like sports teams. Marriage becomes “special” or “unique” or “foundational” or “really really hard but gosh darn it so worth it.” God becomes the world’s best marriage counselor, if you’ll just pay attention to his [sic] three weird tricks for a divorce-proof relationship.

(For a fun combo of the musical and theological categories, check out one of my favorite wedding things to hate, Matthew West’s song “When I Say I Do.” It’s like if that marriage montage from Up was evangelical and bad.)

And, finally, there are my personal quirks. I hate both dressing up and getting my picture taken, and I’m not so great with loud rooms, large crowds, or people I don’t know well. There are always so many strangers, so many opinions, so many logistics, so many bulletins to fold and flowers to pin on. I fully understand that some people find all of this exciting, but my immediate lizard-brain instinct is to run (well, crawl, I suppose) away.

You’ll have to sit next to me at a wedding sometime to hear the rest of my usual complaints. Trust me, I’m a delight. Bible passages, rehearsal strategies, sermons, vows (traditional), vows (prewritten), vows (improvised?!), hymns, unity candles, unity candle alternatives (beer-based), unity candle alternatives (wine-based)—I’ve got something to say about all of it.

So, the fact that I’ve spent the last few years regularly attending the weddings of beloved friends and family members has offered the opportunity for some, uh, character growth.

Many of these friends and family, thankfully, have made things easy on me: choosing wonderful music, crafting beautiful new traditions, hiring pastors who aren’t just there to hear themselves talk. When most of your friends and family are musicians and/or ministers, there’s not quite as much to complain about.

More than that, though, I’ve left each of these weddings thinking about the shared joy and delight and love that was on display—joy and delight and love that was magnified by whatever kind of pomp and circumstance the couple found meaningful. Weddings make space for unabashed, shameless celebrations of who people are and who they’re becoming. And that means their whole selves should be present in everything that happens, Josh-approved or not.

I learned to hate weddings, I think, because I went to so many of them as a hired musician with little or no relationship to anyone there. At a stranger’s wedding, the surface-level aesthetics are all that’s visible, so a negative reaction to some of those aesthetics becomes an aversion to the whole thing. At a friend’s or family member’s, though, those aesthetics represent layers of stories, memories, and relationships. To insist on seeing those layers in everything someone does, even if it’s something you’d find annoying in a vacuum—isn’t that one component of love?

I’m not sure I’ll be able to completely turn the snarky part of my brain off at a wedding any time soon. But, if I think about it, I often save my sharpest snark (in general, even outside of weddings) for the people I love the most—the people whose quirks fit into some bigger sense I have of who they are and why they matter to me. Maybe that means I don’t hate weddings; maybe I love them enough to roll my eyes at their bullshit.

Josh Parks

Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.