What I Learned from the Royal Wedding

Sometimes, the unscripted moments in a wedding are the most memorable. (Photo courtesy of Sprung Photo.)

I have a confession to make:  I didn’t actually watch the whole Royal Wedding last week.  I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, and I will say that it looks quite impressive.  And from talking with other planners, one of the things that seems to have been outstanding was how smoothly everything flowed.

Now, as you probably know if you know anything at all about me, I have a long history in the world of performance as a stage manager.  So, I started thinking about all the things they probably had to do to make the whole event go off so evenly.  I am guessing that they had hours of rehearsal with every single participant and huge teams of event/stage managers who wrangled people into place and made sure that everyone was right on their mark.  (They probably even had rehearsals for the TV cameras, because that would be necessary, also.)

I hear people saying that this wedding has set a new standard for weddings and it is going to influence all of the style trends.  I’ve even heard a planner say she is going to study it to improve her skills in stage management to make her weddings go off like that one did.  I’m all in favor of self-improvement, but that makes me wonder:  Is the performance element of a wedding really the important thing?

Don’t get me wrong:  There is always an element of performance in any ritual created by humans.  It seems to be part and parcel of how we do things.  (Don’t forget that live theatre started out in ancient Greece as a religious ritual!)  Weddings are inherently performative to a certain degree, to the everlasting discomfort of engaged introverts everywhere.

But is the performance element the most important thing?  I would argue that it is not.  In fact, my contention is that it is the least important thing about a wedding.  Making a good spectacle should be near the bottom of the list of concerns.  Up at the top of the list, I would put the content or the heart and the meaning of the day.  Weddings are about a lot of different things (family, community, love, economics, religion, and, yes, spectacle), but I think that they ought to focus on the people who are getting married and on the project of marriage that they are embarking upon together.

And this is why I tell my clients not to stress about whether or not their wedding day goes like a made-for-TV movie.  Yes, the goal is for everything to go off without a hitch, and I always have one eye on creating appropriately dramatic moments, but if there are delays or less-than-perfect performances or even outright mistakes at your wedding, as long as you end up married to the right person at the end of the day, that is all that really matters.