As the lovers spoke their vows, I watched a young woman in a cerise dress sitting in the congregation in front of me. She was lost in their story, her mouth agape, her eyes swimming with its romance. Then, oddly, her face fell from rapture to a sadness edging on tears.
The groom said he had found it hard to cook when his bride wasn’t there to inspire the meal, and couldn’t tell if what he had made was tasty or not – a confusion that was mirrored in every part of his life when she wasn’t around. The bride said that sometimes she didn’t know where she ended and he began. When he spoke she understood herself better, she said.
Their vows effortlessly said the things songwriters bleed to say. They raised a kind of amorous fable wherein commuting princes and track-suited beauties are helplessly drawn to each other. Their psyches and dreams were strands of a helix, entangled, indivisible, until D do us P.
Mr Darcy (Colin Firth) and Miss Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It was an archetypal story, the kind that makes us aware we are not whole – that’s why the world hurts, we are not whole. And if somewhere out there is a transforming love to make us whole, then we’re willing to board any leaky boat or gimp-winged plane to get there – take any risk, wait as long as we must, for that one.
But the better your vows are the more shade they throw on the imperfect romantic realities of your congregation. Listening to descriptions of all-embra.