My favorite celebrity, the wonderful Sakurai Sho, once said in an interview that although he doesn’t quite wish to settle down yet, during weddings, when the slide show of the couple’s pictures from their youth to the present is shown, he feels the intense desire to have a wedding. Just a wedding. I believe I’m beginning to understand.
My cousin S had her church wedding last Saturday, and I was one of two maids of honor. With the change in her marital status, I am pushed into quite an interesting position, and truly, had I been merely an innocent bystander I would be very much intrigued with the progress of our clan drama. After my 31 year 0ld cousin – the oldest cousin, who can’t marry yet despite having a ‘family-approved’ long-time boyfriend because she’s waiting for a migration cue to the United States – I am the next girl in line for ‘the wedding trail’. That is, I’m the next oldest single girl out of six female cousins. You can imagine the pressure from five noisy but well-meaning aunts, who all settled down in their twenties.
It’s not that I don’t want to get married though. It’s just that I can’t imagine myself dating, so I can’t imagine myself having a boyfriend, and as a consequence I can’t imagine myself getting married. I wonder how many people like me are out there. I don’t quite feel desperate to get into any sort of relationship yet, but I don’t want to reach my thirties still single either. It’s complicated. And it’s also very Filipino.
Which leads me to the main anecdote of this long-winded soliloquy. The malicious – although, I’ll admit, very capable – wedding planners of my cousin’s wedding drafted the bouquet throw to go in my favor. May luto – for God’s sake. Filipino wedding traditions go: the single women gather around the bride as she throws the bouquet over her head, and the [unfortunate] soul who catches said bouquet is said to be the next to marry. Same tradition applies to the single men, only in their case it’s a garter throw.
What happened during my cousin’s wedding was that they tricked all of us girls by saying the first few people to catch the bouquet would be saved from having some stranger pull the garter they got from the groom up her leg, until I caught the blasted bouquet and the equally malicious emcee changed the rules. So I had to be the unfortunate girl who had one of her twenty-eight-year-old cousin’s college buddies pull a garter up her leg. In front of her parents and half her maternal side, mind you.
Surprisingly, the experience was not as traumatic as I had always imagined it to be. Maybe because the guy was really nice. We even shook hands.
