Every summer, the people I love most decide to get married, all at once, as if they coordinated it in a group chat I wasn’t in. I wasn’t. I am delighted for them. I am also an accountant now, out of necessity, and the books do not balance. Here is this year’s audit.
Line Item 1: The Save-the-Date
Arrived in January. A photo of the couple on a beach, laughing at something just out of frame. Possibly me. Cost: nothing. Emotional cost: realising everyone I know is building a life, and I am building a spreadsheet of their lives.
Line Item 2: The Hen/Stag Weekend
Three days in a city chosen because “flights were cheap.” Flights were cheap. Everything else was priced as if we were royalty. I paid $60 for a matching T-shirt with a pun on it. I will wear it to paint fences, and I will be buried before it wears out.
Line Item 3: The Outfit
One suit. Bought for wedding one. Worn to weddings two, three and four, in the hope nobody checks the photos. Everybody checks the photos. By wedding four, the suit and I had an understanding: it would see me through the season, then a funeral, then a job interview I would not get.
Wedding season is the only time you can be truly happy for someone and also calculate how many meals the gift cost.
Line Item 4: The Gift
The registry contained a single bowl for the price of a small car. I bought it. It is a beautiful bowl. Statistically, it will outlast the marriage. It has already outlasted my savings. I know exactly how many sandwiches it was. It was February.
Line Item 5: The Dancefloor
Cost: one knee. I did a move I last did at twenty-two. My twenty-two-year-old knee would have been fine. My current knee filed a formal complaint, and the GP can see it in eleven weeks.
Line Item 6: The Speeches
Free. Every best man spoke for eleven minutes and cried by minute nine. I cried too, every time, even at the wedding where I’d met the groom twice. I was not crying for him. I was doing the maths on my pension.
Total
Financially: ruined. Emotionally: a loan from my future self, who will never be repaid.
Watching people promise to put up with each other forever is one of the few things that still feels uncynical. It isn’t. Some of them are wrong. Nobody knows which ones, including them. See you at the second wedding. I’ll wear the suit.