Honore de Balzac wrote in a letter to a friend "It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasion bon mot."
Surely, with the arduous task of being a husband ahead of them, boys are prepared by our culture to accept the mantle of such responsibility? Surely they plan their futures with as much attention as their female peers? Surely they are groomed to be grooms?
Well, not exactly. As a number of people have pointed out, from stand-up comics to sociologists, there is no masculine equivalent of Brides magazine; it will be a long time before Grooms magazine hits the newsstand.
Young men do not usually discuss the potential members of their wedding party or possible colors for their cummerbund.
When asked, most young women can describe their ideal wedding in detail, although they might hesitate to admit it for fear of seeming too eager to marry or for fear of seeming anachronistic in their wishes.
When I ask, "What will your wedding be like?" young women will often describe weddings that would take more preparation than the coronation of the emperor of Japan. It is telling that they can do this in spite of the fact that they might not even have a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé, at the time. Not that there aren't slip ups in the fantasy: One student of mine kept referring to her fiancé as her "finance" by mistake--not a good beginning.
The ideas of the dream wedding cherished by these young women were far more focused than their ideas of the dream husband, and their plans did not appear to depend in any way on the individual man they would happen to marry at the time. In contrast, the typical young man, when asked, "What will your wedding be like?" responds that he has not considered the event. He will then instinctively resort to the "passive voice" in constructing a sentence and say something along the lines of, "When it happens, it happens."
Of course, as one female student of mine muttered with a certain amount of bitterness, "All the guys have to do is rent a tuxedo. Why can't women rent wedding dresses?" Why indeed? A man might, presumably, have more than one occasion to wear a tuxedo in his lifetime, where a woman is meant to wear her wedding dress once. Yet she purchases the garment for what can be an astronomical sum while he rents the dark suit for a minimum amount of money, with no cash down. It's like the old children's game of finding "what's wrong with this picture?"
Shouldn't it be the other way around? "A wedding dress is supposed to represent a woman's purity and emphasize the importance and uniqueness of the day," tutored a wedding consultant at an all-day seminar for prospective brides as she convinced eighteen-year-olds to purchase one of the more modest numbers--one of the mere thousand-dollar dresses.
What's the rented tuxedo on the groom supposed to represent, I wondered, the fact that the groom has been around the block a few times and is uncertain whether to commit himself to relationship? Or, perhaps more importantly, does the rented tux indicate that he is a sort of "generic" man, a figure who will not be the center of attention on this day?
"The young men who come in to rent formal wear do not often have any say in the matter," says the manager of a major rental outlet. "They are told what to order by their fiancées, and they don't feel like it's any business of theirs to argue, even if they are uncomfortable with the choice. But the boys mostly seem to think along the lines of ‘Well, she gets to do what she wants for a couple of months. Then I get to call the shots.'"
There seemed to be fundamental inequalities at work that can't help either member of the bridal couple survive life after the wedding.
