A Perfect Binding

A Perfect Binding
Originally uploaded by andrew s.

Last Friday night, Anya and I attended Scott and Leilah’s wedding. On a beautiful Vancouver summer evening, in a setting that evoked the binding of two cultures, Middle Eastern and middle-class Canadian, I was profoundly moved by the expression of love from both the guests and the newlyweds.

In the afterglow of the event, Anya and I were relating to each other about how it was one of the best weddings we had ever attended. This started me thinking about what makes a wedding great. What makes the difference between a wedding you never want to end and one where you want to jump for the door at the first excuse? What is that we seek at weddings, if in fact we are there for reasons other than guilt or the fact that we are related to one of the people being married?

The first factor in greatness, I think, is your relation to the couple, and how positive you feel they are the perfect match for each other. The type and number of guests is also a critical factor. It has to be the right mix of young and old, relatives and friends. You need to have older relatives that keep partying late into the evening. Scott and Leilah have lived and worked in different parts of the world, and picked up friends from many different countries, and so the guests were a cosmopolitan mix. There were guests from Australia, Wales, England, all over the US, Japan, Belgium and France. Throughout the different nooks and spaces of Cecil Green you could hear bouquets of conversation floating through the hot night air.

You could feel the love and happiness everyone felt for the couple, which contributed to what I consider the most important factor of a great wedding: the event must be a celebration of love and life. To witness the outpouring of love and sincere happiness for two people is so rare, that we are compelled to make such an event a celebration.

Think about what a miracle it is for all the actions and consequences to occur and result in attending such a joyous event. Just what are the chances of two people finding each other in this world? How many events occurred and how many decisions were made that led to us being here? Leilah’s father is from Baghdad; Scott’s father emigrated from Scotland. Since both of them have traveled all over the world it is quite possible they could have met someone else.

The rarity of makes you appreciate it when it happens, and so we must celebrate it. It is seldom that you feel good about yourself just to have been connected to these people, knowing that in some small way you may have contributed, unknowingly, and many years ago, to the genesis of this event. It made me feel that I must have done something right to be sitting here feeling the love all around us.