OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
ELITE WEDDINGS
By Carol Shih
Published: November 23, 2010
Durham, NC.
AT LEAST five times a day I wake my sleeping Toshiba laptop
with a forceful press to its power button, open a new browser,
and watch as The New York Times appears on my homepage.
There it is, stamped in block letters and divided into
subheadings: Opinion and Markets to your right, a big glossy
photo-of-the-day smack-dab in the middle, and the Headlines
You Must Read to the left. And every day, I glance at these
important Headlines and Markets and Opinions in their ugly
blue, but not quite dark-blue font, and I pretend to be
interested in the world. Because having The NY Times on your
homepage legitimizes your worldliness and makes your IQ
seem higher than it actually is by 10 points; and maybe you’re not the dummy that everyone thought you were.
But I read The New York Times for a different reason. I read it because… ugh, I like their Wedding Section.
To be honest, it’s a little hard for me to admit this to myself. I’m a fourth-year journalism student. I’m writing my thesis on
journalism. I’m supposed to eat, breathe, and dream about the news. Ask me about Iraq, and I should be able to tell you how many
U.S. soldiers have died already and when we’re supposed to pull out our troops. (No clue.) I should be able to tell you why the
Democrats got kicked in the butt in the last midterm election and how many Republicans won seats in the House... or is it the
Senate? (Again, no idea.) And Obama, you ask? What’s he doing right now? (Well… he’s being presidential and doing his
presidential duties….) Clearly, I am as useless to you as a gumball machine. And it’s all because I don’t read the news. I read the
Weddings/Celebrations Section.
Yeah, I know. I disgust myself too.
I was never the kind of girl to plan her wedding twenty years ahead of time. In fact, I thought all those girls were a little stupid,
because who plans a wedding when they’re not getting married? What a waste of brainspace. But there’s something oddly satisfying
about reading the story of the late Rockefeller’s greatgreatgreat grand daughter getting married to this also rich, but very humble
guy and their wedding looks kind of like a fairytale because she’s wearing this simple, but elegant $5,000 gown that scoops low in
the back, and her wedding takes place in this magical garden. Or on the beach. Or in a polished white tent. And all the newlyweds
are made for each other. They’re perfect for each other and they can’t imagine themselves with anyone else because the person
they’ve just married is their missing puzzle piece… in human form. Maybe the Times will cover a gay wedding or two each week,
but it’s usually the same story: rich, educated boy meets rich, educated girl (for some reason these are the weddings they highlight)
and they have a rich, extravagant wedding.
For example, take this wedding announcement published on November 12, 2010 for Kathleen Chen and Alexander Ropper.i
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“Dr. Kathleen Chen and Dr. Alexander Eli Ropper were married Saturday at the St. Regis Monarch Beach
Resort in Dana Point, Calif. Rabbi David Burstein officiated.
(Aaron Delesie)
The bride and bridegroom, both 30, are in their fourth years of residencies at Brigham and Womenʼs
Hospital in Boston, Dr. Chen in anesthesiology and Dr. Roper in neurosurgery. They met at Tufts, from
which they received medical degrees and from which the bride also received her undergraduate degree.”
The announcement continues on. The bridegroom is the brainy product of a mother who works in a fancy-named program that
addresses public policy issues involving chemical and biological warfare, and a father who is conveniently the vice chairman of the
neurology department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
David Brooks, a writer for The New Yorker, called these kinds of folks the “New-Class Nuptials.” They’re unabashedly elitist with
their fancy jobs, fancy schools, and fancy weddings. But it didn’t always used to be this way. Back in the ‘50s it was all about
connections and ancestry, and you would read sentences that made you feel like you were attending some debutante ball. And,
sure, only certain people read the wedding announcements because not everyone received the newspaper at their doorstep. Sixty
years later, everyone can access the Wedding pages online and multimedia is in full swing. In the Weddings/Celebrations section,
you’ll find videos of couples exchanging their “how we met” story and slideshows of wedding photos taken with to-die-for cameras
that capture every beaded sparkle on a gown. Unlike the old days, a new elite class has formed—one that’s not based on ancestry,
but rather on educational and career opportunities. They’ve all got some sort of nice undergraduate degree and a master’s or PhD
to top their impressive resumes, and they’re getting married in their late 20s-mid 30s because they waited until their lives were in
order before they tied the knot. The couples listed on the online version of the Times may be skin-tone diverse, but they’re all the
same upper middle-class people raised in the safe part of town. You get a sense that these couples are smart, responsible adults—
the kind of people you wouldn’t mind having over for dinner because they’re intelligent enough to hold a decent conversation, and
sane enough to not whip out a machete and hack you to pieces over the mashed potatoes. They’re the kind of Americans who were
made for dinner parties—who stop by Starbucks in the morning for a soy latte and surf the web on their Blackberry or iPhone
while they’re taking the subway to work.
Call me skeptical, but I have a hard time believing that Mr. Jack Cole here didn’t eat pot brownies and smoke whatever came in a
cylinder back when he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Harvard. (Yes, Harvard.) And I have a feeling that Ms. Margaret
Sampson used to visit dirty bars and scream at the top of her lungs when she got drunk before she became this high-profile
consultant at Goldman Sachs who now works for underprivileged youth. Where are the real stories of real people? If Liz Cardel is
on her second marriage, what happened to her first? Where’s the girl who got impregnated at the age of sixteen, kept her baby, and
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married the guy to please her parents? Where are the divorces, the affairs, and the people who marry for money? It’s hard for me to
believe these people are as perfect as the Times presents them.
Now, I’ll have to admit, if the Times took all my suggestions and actually started reporting the grisly details of people’s messed-up
lives, I’m pretty sure a lot of their subjects would end up visiting their shrinks. Plus, I’d probably stop reading the Times’ Wedding
Section anyway. It’s not fun reading about real people who meet each other, screw everything up, and still get married. Every
person wants to believe they’ll be part of that exceptional group of happy-go-lucky couples, and the Times satisfies this craving for
idealism. Not to mention, the Washington Post douses its Nuptial stories in reality and it’s completely different. I’ll let the Post
speak for itself.
Nuptials: Latosha Frink & Troy Harrisonii
Sunday, November 14, 2010
(Eileen Kirklen)
Latosha Frink, 33, is a government contracting officer. Troy Harrison, 36, is a police officer. They live in
Lanham.
Wedding date: Oct. 10.
Location: Catering by Uptown's Town and Country Ballroom, Landsdowne.
Guests: 200
How they met: Latosha was out with her girlfriends at the now-defunct Platinum nightclub in January 2004
when she felt someone touching her hair. She turned around to find Troy. (He wanted to know if it was
real.) By the end of the night, Troy had scored Latosha's phone number -- and a date for the next night.
I swear the Post actually published this on their website. And although it’s entertaining to read about the not-so-privileged, I’ll
admit, I still prefer the Times’ couples. I’ll scour the online pages every couple of days for fresh newlyweds and enter a world of
fiction where perfect bliss exists. It’s where women spend extravagant sums on silk wedding dresses they’ll never wear again and
dance with their husband for the first time under the stars. For the 3-4 minutes it takes me to read their vows, I forget that these
marriages will probably end in messy divorces. I’m no longer in the library working on my thesis and, suddenly, the guy sitting at
my table who I’ve been telling for the umpteenth time to please stop typing so loudly disappears. The world is Good again.
So, Times, I’ll let you off the hook (and myself too). You can stick with your fairy-princess-happily-ever-after stories, but that’s only
because I grew up watching Disney videocassettes and I still base my ideas of true love on Simba and Nala. I can’t help it if I enjoy
the fraudulence and live vicariously through these people who spend money in ways that I can’t. But the warmfuzzyfeelings always
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dissolve as quickly as they’d arrived. After I’ve finished reading the entire story of the couples’ lives and looked through each
picture in their slideshow not once, but twice, the happy feeling begins to dissipate, quickly, at the rate that proteins catalyze.
Because deepdeepdeepdown I know it’s all fake and the world is not as happy as the Times makes it to be; it’s never quite as
glamorous. And then you’d think—after I’ve fed my inner lovesick girl —that I’d move on to read the news. The Real Stuff. About
Iraq and Obama and North Korea’s scary dictator so I could become a real journalism student instead of a journalism student who
fakes it….
But, instead, I move on to the Dining and Wine section.
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i “Kathleen Chen and Alexander Ropper.” The New York Times. 12 November 2010. Web. 14 November 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/
fashion/weddings/14CHEN.html.>
ii “Latosha Frink and Troy Harrison.” The Washington Post. 14 November 2010. Web. 14 November 2010. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2010/11/11/AR2010111108572.html.>
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Acknowledgments:
Thank you to my writing group, Professor Harris, David Brooks’ opinions, and The New York Times website for its endless flaws
and entertainment.
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