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Weddings can be wonderful. So don’t fuck yours up. The next few sections are about weddings.

Destination Weddings

You are not important. You just aren’t. You’re one person. You are not the person. We have established earlier in this column that you are not a fucking medieval despot. You cannot control the destinies of your subjects. You are one fucking brief flicker of a human life. You are lucky to have friends. Friends who have lives. Who have jobs. Who even have other fucking weddings to go to. So don’t hold your fucking wedding on some other continent. Go to that continent for your honeymoon. That’s what honeymoons are for. Go with your new fucking spouse and fuck each other on that there continent. Good, fine. Don’t ask your friends to throw down five thousand dollars for your special day. What if they have another wedding to go to this year? That’s another two grand, minimum. Who the fuck has seven thousand dollars for weddings in one year? In one fucking year? What if there’s a third fucking wedding? What if people actually know more than two people? Then you are a fucking asshole. Then you have sent your friends into crippling debt because you wanted to get married in Bali. You have stagnated the economy and purchasing power of the nation’s middle class because of you and your fucking adolescent notion of standing on a beach in Bali when you fucking say your vows. Well fuck you. Fuck your adolescent self. Your adolescent self is a scourge upon the middle and working classes and the chief barrier to economic justice. The point of your wedding is for your friends and family to see you get married. To all be together. The point is not to get married in Bali. You have no fucking right to get married in Bali. And you know what? No one will see you get married in Bali. Your great aunt, who cared for you every summer, especially that summer after your parents got divorced, will not make it to Bali. She cannot afford Bali and she just got that hip operation so there is no fucking way she can sit on planes for 18 hours to see your nasty spectacle of waste and self-regard. Your decision to have your wedding 8,000 miles away will break her fucking heart. You will create a permanent rift in your family because you want to do your vows on Balinese sand. Well, fuck you. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to ruin the last years of your great aunt’s life — she was a fucking nurse in the Korean War, you motherfucking pissant — and you don’t get to do that. And you don’t get to command five thousand dollars of each of your friends’ money. Think about it. You fuck up your great aunt’s final years, after all she did for the soldiers who bravely fought in Korea, and for what? For what? Where is your humanity? Your humility? And what about the fucking math? Think about it. $5000 for each guest to get to Bali and back, the hotel, expenses, everything. And you invited 100 people. So your fucking wedding is worth $500,000? Half a million dollars should be spent because you met your special guy? You don’t deserve that. You deserve nothing. You are a cancer. Just have a fucking wedding that people can go to. Go to Bali afterward, and spend your own fucking money. Go to some bar by the beach with your husband who wears his sunglasses on the top of his head. Get drunk all night and stumble onto the beach and make out. I hope you get robbed. You will get robbed. The world is poison and you are a rat and there is justice for the cruel.

Wedding Costs

Keep the fucking costs down. The first thing to do when you start talking to caterers and other vendors is this: Never. Tell. Them. It’s. Your. Wedding. You heard me. Don’t tell the caterer. Don’t tell the flower people. Don’t tell the band. Tell them it’s for your uncle’s release from prison. If you tell them it’s a wedding, they will skullfuck you on every cost. The same meatball that would cost .50 at your uncle’s get-out-of-prison party will cost your wedding $20. At some point, the caterer will say it’s $150 a plate. They will fucking say those words, which are, by the way, specifically banned by the UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is in Article III, paragraph 2. Look it the fuck up. Can you look something up? Are you capable? It specifically says that humans cannot be violated this way, by caterers who think their offerings are worth $150 a head. Where does this number come from? I will tell you. That number comes from them desiring to skullfuck you. Caterers are, by and large, devout Satanists descended from actual demonspawn, and they hate your happiness. They want to make you pay for your sense of contentment. They want to skullfuck you with expenses until your wedding is a wreck and a sham and an obscene spectacle that will cripple you with midnight guilt all the rest of your years.

Wedding Bands

Don’t book that fucking wedding band. Don’t you fucking do it. Get a real band. Any real band. A real band that cares. Wedding bands are horrible people who hate you. They hate your guests. They hate the outfits your guests wear. They hate the way your relatives dance. They hate young people. They hate old people. They hate children. And they hate weddings and they hate the music they play. Thus they will charge you in the skullfuck way preferred by demonspawn. They will charge you $15,000 and they will still feel underpaid. They will sound great but their eyes will be dead. They will sing “Celebrate” with the dead eyes of deepwater sharks. You know who makes $15,000 for one night? Flock of Seagulls. This is true. You can get Flock of Seagulls for the same price you’d pay the dead-eyed wedding band. Or less. You might be able to get the ’Gulls for $10,000. Or $5,000 if they’re already passing through your part of the country. Or you could get Kenny Loggins. You could probably get Kenny Loggins for $10,000. Think of it. Or Juice Newton. Or the Beaver Brown Band. Or the Little River Band. And those fuckers would tear it up. They would care, and they would not hate you the way the Skullfuck Wedding Band hates you and hates life and is waiting for the apocalypse, where they will finally care about what they play, because their audience will be Satan, from whom they descend and into whose gullet they will throw themselves in the first minutes of the End of Days.

Wedding Guest Lists

Figure it out so you can invite everyone. Don’t cut people out. If you have 200 friends, fucking invite them all. Don’t get your heart set on some shitty little church that holds twelve. Fuck you and fuck that. The other 188 people who thought you loved them will now hate you and want you dead. And you will die inside. You will see these former friends on the street and know you have wronged them and the world’s balance of justice and harmony. You chose a fucking tiny church over your friends. Over the friends who stood up to your parents when they said you were a drug addict, who held your hair when you puked at Helen’s house. Who drove you home after you tried to surprise Tim and found him sucking off his brother’s best friend, the wide receiver from the rival school. The little church doesn’t fucking matter. The people matter, you motherfucker. Fuck that church and fuck you.