Jane Austen is looking down on me and wishing she could write a book about my adventures as a wedding guest. I can almost see her, fingers itching to pick up pen and put it to parchment. And knowing Jane as I do, she’s annoyed she didn’t get to teach me a narrative lesson and pair me with some insufferable know-it-all who could keep me out of trouble. This would be the proper, narrative ending to my visit into wedding land. And it would make so many people so happy.

See here’s the thing. I have been to six weddings in the last fourteen months. I’ll leave it to you to calculate how many glasses of wine and cheese-based appetizers that adds up to.

I hadn’t been invited to a single wedding in six or seven years and then BOOM: weddings here, there, and everywhere, though, to be totally honest, half of the weddings I attended this past year have been as an FoW.* I’ve been to traditional church weddings, intimate at-home events, vineyards, capes, ranches, and castles. And I’ve seen more kinds of dancing than I can name. I might have danced with a United States Senator to “Brick House” and I discovered the true physics of high heels. No matter how comfortable the shoes, you will be forced to stand in them until your feet go numb.

After so many weddings, it’s impossible not to feel reflective. So as I waited for the bride in wedding number six to walk down the aisle, I thought back over the other five weddings I’ve witnessed. One of the many things I realized, besides the fact that bridesmaids’ dresses have come a long way since the wedding that found me in a taffeta monstrosity designed for flat-chested women and in a color that does not exist in nature, is that that my focus during the ceremonies is not so much on the brides but the grooms.

I am fascinated by them.

It’s not that the brides aren’t interesting. It is wonderful to see brides who are strong, intelligent and independent as opposed to mealy-mouthed wallflowers who look more desperate than happy on the big day. But it’s the grooms who captured my attention during this wedding marathon. It had been so long since I’d been to a wedding, that I hadn’t truly understood that there is a new model of groom in the wedding world. They are a different species than the hapless creatures I saw growing up. Regardless of race, class, or educational background, the grooms I talked to were active participants in the planning of their weddings, rattling off colors, caterers, and wedding details as quickly as their brides. I listened to two men discuss the best attire for their groomsmen.

I felt like Alice through the looking glass.

And just as I was getting used to that, a groom casually informed me that his wedding was as much, if not more, his idea than the bride’s fantasy. After attending more than 30 weddings, he knew the kind of wedding he wanted. And so while his bride, a woman whose regal bearing walking down the aisle worked wonders on my very cynical heart, would have been happy with a city-hall affair, he had dreams of vineyards.

Imagine, a man who dreamed about his wedding!

Even still, this is not why the grooms captivated me. First I thought I was fascinated by grooms because I’ve bought into the myth that men don’t want to “commit” so seeing those willing to do so in the biggest way possible is like seeing unicorns. Then I thought I was just taking advantage of the opportunity to stare unabashedly at well-dressed, handsome men, but what became clear during wedding number four is that I am fixed on the grooms because it’s rare to see men as open and tender as they are on their wedding day.

As a woman with more male friends than is probably healthy, I see men in many moods, and I see their faces as they look at the women and men they are attracted to or care about. But it’s rare to see a man look the way he does on his wedding day—slightly weepy and awestruck at once. I’ve decided that men never look more like tentative little boys then they do in the few minutes it takes their brides to reach them. The moment vanishes, and if you’re busy watching the bride, it’s easy to miss—once she’s there, he exhales, and he looks like a man again, more joyous than the average bloke but certainly less timid. They change in an instant.

The shy groom who would rather wear a skirt (you say kilt I say skirt) in public than speak to even a small group of friends and family endeared himself to me forever when, after repeating his vows, exhaled, “Whew, I did it!” We all applauded. And I look forward to toasting the golden anniversary of the groom who walked down the aisle with his new bride to the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

It makes me wonder what kind of men Jane would write for her heroines were she alive today. By the time she wrote Persuasion, she had developed a man I feel is worthy of a feminist’s daydreams, but you have to suffer through a lot of insufferable men to get to Captain Wentworth (I read Austen chronologically :blush:). Would she let go of arrogant Darcy and smug Knightley and replace them with Marks, Scotts, Jasons, and Lawrences? I like to think she would. I think she’d like these grooms. She’d certainly poke sly fun of them, but it would be with an affection that mirrors my own, I’m sure. And if she plotted a story that put me with some version of one of them, I wouldn’t balk…not one bit.

*Friend of Will