NYT Weddings Section

"They caught each other's gaze across a vegetable field." "The bride's sister read a passage by Laura Ingalls Wilder." "A leader of the Ethical Culture Society led the couple in vowing to nurture each other 'in sickness and health, upstate and down.'" In the September 19th "Vows" column, Devan Sipher of The New York Times reports that, in spite of their diametrically opposed stances on animal-slaughter, Gabrielle Langholtz and Craig Haney – she a vegetarian food writer, he an animal husbandry specialist – found love in their shared passion for the world of Little House on the Prairie. A real-life farmer's fairytale! How charmingly unlikely.

Ah, but of course. The stories in the "Weddings and Celebrations" section of the Sunday New York Times are carefully crafted for popular consumption. Writing these babies is a formulaic process that resembles a kind of selective trash-compressor: 1) Reporter amasses multi-dimensional junk pile of related artifacts that make up a couple's experience together. 2) Reporter selects from the pile whichever kitschy doodads catch the most light (eg. "[at the wedding] she was four months pregnant — timed so the delivery would coincide with Mr. Haney's low season"). 3) Reporter draws choice doodads out from the pile and places them into a neat, one-dimensional row of heart-warming anecdotes. The end product? Readers' hungry, order-loving eyes are free to hop from scrap to scrap and perceive a cute, linear story about the realization of a young girl's dream to find her very own Pa Ingalls.

Why has this reality-flattening assembly line gone heretofore unnoticed by critics? Because they're too busy deriding who it is that The Times deems suitable for a ride on the conveyor belt. Usually, "he" graduated from Harvard with a degree in something quirky, "she," from Princeton with a degree in something hip which proves women totally go for penetrating that (increasingly brittle!) glass ceiling -- and that the column is totally not an archaic tradition! Doctorates, masters, and Wall Street (until recently) abound, as the lucky couple of the day promises to love and to cherish, in richness and in wealth, until the Monday paper lands on America's doorstep.

But my question is, why do we, no matter our alma mater or annual income, have the impulse to put our love lives through the fictionalize-ing machine, only to have them spit out as guilty-pleasure reading? Couples willingly re-enact "the way they met" in the "Vow Videos" section online. Lovebirds agree to meet the requirement listed on the "Applying for Announcements" page, which reads "Couples posing for pictures should arrange themselves with their eyebrows on exactly the same level." Only, shouldn't love mean never having to apologize for asymmetry?

Reality is apparently a small price to pay for due recognition; to have one's love "selected" and lauded as unique is an undeniable personal victory. But it is also a pyrrhic one. The "specialness" between two people is erased the moment their private connection is publicly defined as "special" in soily black print.

I'm sure the animal husband and the organic foody, or the 27 year-old JP Morgan executive and the venture-capitalist-by-day-first-tenor-performing-Verdi's "Falstagg"-by-night truly share something glorious. Yet unfortunately, the one-dimensional narrative that The Times squeezes out for public consumption cheapens the magic between these twosomes. I think any reader would admit this, but we're nevertheless entranced -- still gathered here today, to witness Sunday morning's prairie-land fantasies. - Katy Pinke