The Wedding is a Lie

For nearly forty years, I made a living as a professional photographer. In that time, I shot breathtaking landscapes, gritty street scenes, and intimate portraits. I also, on six separate and deeply memorable occasions, shot a wedding. And I can tell you, with the authority of someone who has been in the trenches, that the modern wedding is a freaking nightmare.

Forget the gauzy, soft-focus fantasy sold in bridal magazines. The reality is a high-pressure, high-anxiety performance piece, a vortex of misplaced expectations and frantic improvisation. There is always someone—a mother, the bride, the wedding planner, or on one particularly memorable occasion, the groom—who is in the throes of an anxiety attack so profound they seem capable of murdering everyone in the building before the string quartet can stumble through the first few bars of Pachelbel’s Canon. Each of those six experiences, a marathon of forced smiles and logistical chaos, cemented a core belief that has guided me ever since: people do better as couples when they are not forced to participate in an ancient ritual that carries the crushing, impossible expectation of being “perfect.” My advice? Love each other. Build a life together. But for God’s sake, just don’t do the wedding.

My current partner and I have been together for thirteen years. We are, by any measure, a happy and successful couple. We briefly considered getting married, a fleeting thought born more of social convention than any real need. But she, a wise and perceptive woman, quickly saw what I have seen for decades: weddings, in their modern incarnation, are a fucking nightmare.

This is not a new revelation. My view of the wedding as a performance of convenience was shaped long before I ever picked up a camera professionally. As the son of a pastor in a small town, I witnessed tons of weddings. Most were the familiar church-and-reception affair, a public spectacle for the whole community. But just as many, if not more, took place in the quiet of our own living room. These were the “secret” weddings, sought by couples who, for one reason or another, didn’t want everyone in town to know they were hitched.

Why the secrecy? The reasons were varied and, to a young boy, endlessly fascinating. Maybe the bride was pregnant, a significant social “no-no” in the rural Midwest of the 1970s. A quiet ceremony in the pastor’s house allowed the couple to secure the legal status of marriage without inviting the scrutiny and gossip of the community. Maybe the groom had just sold a prized cow against his father’s wishes, and the couple was sneaking away to get married before the old man found out and put a stop to their plans. The reasons were often, by today’s standards, ridiculous, but they revealed a fundamental truth: even then, in that deeply religious and traditional environment, the “sacred” institution of marriage was often just a practical tool. It was a legal device, a social workaround, a means to an end. It was about solving a problem, not celebrating a romance.

These experiences, from the living room of my childhood to the chaotic reception halls of my professional life, have always informed my skepticism. But it was not until I encountered the story of a young Afghan woman named Marjan that I truly understood the raw, unvarnished foundation upon which this entire institution is built. Her story, documented in a harrowing essay by the translator Asad Nariman, is not an exotic tale from a distant land. It is a look in a brutally honest mirror, reflecting the historical DNA of a ritual we continue to practice, oblivious to its origins.

Marjan’s life, in the rural Pashtun regions of Afghanistan, is governed by a social structure that has remained largely unchanged for millennia. Her story is not a metaphor; it is a literal case study in what marriage has been for most of human history: a property transaction. This reality is encoded in the very language of her culture. There is ‘walwar’, the bride price, where a woman’s value is explicitly calculated based on her health, her height, and, ironically for a society that denies them education, her literacy level. There is ‘baad’, the practice of giving a woman as “blood money” to settle a feud, reducing her to a living, breathing payment for a man’s crime. And there is ‘namus’ (honor), the concept used to justify the forced remarriage of a widow to her deceased husband’s male relatives, cementing her status as inherited chattel.

At the age of twelve, Marjan was sold by her father to a Taliban fighter for hashish money. This was her wedding. There was no pretense of love or partnership. It was a clear, simple transaction. Her 24-year journey of captivity—first in her husband’s family compound under the cruel watch of his mother, then in an even more remote desert plain—is a devastating chronicle of a life treated as an object. When her husband decided to take a second wife, it was not a matter of infidelity, but a practical decision because Marjan, the first property, was deemed defective for being “barren.” When her husband was eventually killed, she was widowed, but she was not free. She was still the property of her late husband’s family, and her “necessary” marriage to his kind-hearted nephew, Nasim, was less a choice than a transfer of title to the only person who might not treat her with cruelty.

It is easy for us in the West to read Marjan’s story with a sense of detached horror, to see it as the product of a uniquely “backward” or “uncivilized” culture. But this is a profound error. This, I would argue, is a worldview espoused by a civilization that was, in many ways, stomped out of existence for damn good reasons. To dismiss Marjan’s experience as alien is to ignore the uncomfortable truth that our own wedding rituals are simply sanitized, flower-draped versions of the very same archaic and transactional principles.

The entire mess, when you look closely, is completely insane on one hand and deeply demeaning to women on the other. Consider the ancient rituals upon which our modern traditions are built. Among one particular tribe of Jews, for example, the bride would walk down the “aisle” between the two halves of a freshly slaughtered ox. This was her father’s way of demonstrating the value of the property he was offering, a visceral signal to the groom’s family saying, “I confirm that she will be a good wife, as fertile and valuable as this beast.”

We may find that disgusting, but are our own rituals so different in their symbolic meaning? The tradition of the father “giving away the bride” is not a sweet, sentimental gesture. It is the literal, symbolic transfer of property from one man to another. The white dress, which we now see as a symbol of celebration, was historically a stark advertisement of a bride’s virginity, a key component of her value in the transactional marriage market. The veil was meant to ward off evil spirits, yes, but also to obscure the bride’s face until the transaction was complete, a practice not so different from Marjan not being allowed to show her face to her new family. The tossing of the garter and bouquet? These are tame, polite remnants of much older, more chaotic rituals where wedding guests would physically tear at the bride’s clothing for “good luck” and to ensure the marriage was quickly and publicly consummated.

We have wrapped these traditions in lace and light and five-tier cakes, but their foundational DNA remains the same. They are rooted in concepts of ownership, property transfer, and the social and economic control of women. We have simply learned to perform the charade with better lighting and a string quartet. The modern wedding, with all its attendant stress and performative nonsense, is a lie. It is a beautiful, expensive, and deeply cherished lie, but it is a lie nonetheless. It pretends to be about love and romance, while its skeleton is built from the bones of patriarchal tradition and property law.

Which brings me back to my own life. Thirteen years ago, my partner and I chose each other. We built a life, a home, and a partnership based on mutual respect, love, and a shared sense of humor. We did it without a wedding, without the anxiety, without the expense, and without the need to participate in a ritual whose history we find both ridiculous and repugnant. Our partnership is not defined by a public performance or a legal contract rooted in ancient transactions. It is defined by the daily, quiet, and deliberate act of choosing to be together.

That, I believe, is the truth. A true union is not found in a ceremony. It is built, day by day, in the shared space between two people. It is a design for living, not a performance of an ancient, unnecessary, and often demeaning ritual. It is a partnership, not a fucking nightmare.