Hooray For Me!
A Friendly Rant From Captain Spaulding
(Captain Spaulding Action Figures Sold Separately)

DEARLY BELOVED, WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY TO GET TO THIS THING CALLED... WIFE

WANTED: Woman, 18-35, to fill out wedding gown and serve as distaff half of already-scheduled wedding. Traditional vows and lifetime marital obligations expected. Only serious prospective brides need apply. Box 1232.

We are no longer a nation that shocks easily. In an era when new twists on cultural mores (romance division) occur with increasing regularity, incidents that are so head-snapping that the entire punditocracy takes notice are few and far between.

When they do occur and the national tongue starts clucking, there's usually victims involved. Mary Kay LeTourneau may have presented a titillating picture as she lived out every adolescent boy's "Hot For Teacher" fantasy, but the end result was a wrecked family, a prison stay for a mentally ill woman, a confused teenage father, and yet another infant starting out down two strikes in the home department. Lorena Bobbitt's attempt to deal with her husband John via surprise ad hoc surgery inevitably left them both lesser people. And the recent Sports Illustrated cover story on the epidemic of out-of-wedlock children being sired by pro basketball players opens up a whole depressing diaperful of social issues that are impervious to Handi-Wipes.

How oddly pleasant, then, that the latest cultural brouhaha surrounds a wedding. Weddings are rarely tragic affairs, except to jilted ex-flames and overreaching parents. Unless the myth of wrathful fathers bearing shotguns in rural West Virginia has a basis in fact, weddings are the perfect interpersonal transaction: Two consenting adults, free will intact, enter into a permanent legal contract with eyes wide open and a roomful of approving witnesses. The fact that these two people claim to love each other is, like the fact that half of these marriages will be derailed by divorce, irrelevant in one important sense. Weddings work because everyone walks out of the church happy. How many other public functions can say that nowadays?

David Weinlick, a 28-year-old graduate student in anthropology from Minneapolis, was banking on that largesse of goodwill when he hatched his scheme to get himself a bride. Weinlick was not content with the rather declasse mail-order-bride process by which a romantically thwarted American bachelor uses his checkbook and his residency in the United States to garner a young Asian or Eastern European beauty that he selects from a catalog. Nothing but a bona-fide American girl would do for him. So, with the cunning native to any specialist in human behavior, Weinlick concocted a plan to find his better half without suffering further the dispiriting pains of rejection and the ridiculous peacock dance of nineties courtship that unmarried penisbearers usually have to endure.

Weinlick extensively advertised his search for a woman for the purpose of marriage. While this is hardly remarkable--half of the papers and 'zines in the country have "Men Seeking Women" and "Women Seeking Men" classifieds--Weinlick outdid all of his fellow companion-hunting males. He announced in his ads that the date and place of the wedding was already set...Saturday, June 13, 1998 in Bloomington, MN's sprawling Mall of America. All that his yet-unknown bride would have to do was show up with a gown that day and fill out a brief curriculum vitae. In the event of multiple aspirants, Weinlick would select the winner from among them right there on the spot.

Sorting out one's preference among competing women is, as Homer pointed out at the beginning of The Illiad, not that happy of a task. But considering the fact that David Weinlick seriously intended to meet and marry his bride within the space of a single day, it seemed to be the least of his worries.

Fittingly, the wedding date combined the traditional (June) with the ominous (the thirteenth). This was not going to be your typical sashay down the aisle. Which was more shocking--that someone had taken a land-rush approach to getting married to one of whichever women showed up at the starting line, or that a man had usurped that most feminine of prerogatives...planning a wedding?

The wire services picked up the story the week before the wedding, and the event quickly degenerated into a media circus. Since Weinlick (the ultimate consumer bridegroom) had aptly selected a huge mall as his wedding chapel, two thousand complete strangers took time out from their shopping to watch him marry another complete stranger.

Weinlick's parents are divorced--which may or may not shed light on his quixotic quest--and his father refused to attend what he viewed as a farce. The flow of media commentary appeared to be in the senior Mr. Weinlick's corner.

But here's where the story takes a charming, even hopeful, turn. A couple dozen women from several states who were intent upon becoming Mrs. David Weinlick showed up at the "bridal candidate mixer" held immediately before the wedding. Rather than select from among them himself, Weinlick dragooned his friends and family into interviewing the prospective brides at the mixer and then voting on the candidates, narrowing them down first to five finalists and then choosing the bride from among them. Weinlick agreed to abide by their consensus.

His loved ones selected for him Elizabeth Runze, also 28, a pharmacy student at the University of Minnesota. In a disconcerting and unprecedented display of good sportswomanship, the four rebuffed finalists agreed to stick around and serve as bridesmaids. Weinlick's hand may have been slightly tipped by the fact that he had met Runze the previous Monday when she had dropped off her bridal "application". Yet the final decision was not his, and his friends and family all seemed to think that they had picked out a real winner for him. Weinlick's friend Steven Fletcher said that the two had similar interests and senses of humor (that much seems obvious) and were intellectually compatible. "You can just see the chemistry between these two. Those two just look right together."

Why charming, and why hopeful? Think about the fact that mutually-selecting spouses, the normal state of affairs for the Western world, have created for themselves a runaway divorce rate that has had an untold negative impact upon American society. Left to our own devices when choosing a mate, we continually let ourselves down. While that crazy little thing called love seems to rule all in the Western version of mating, it doesn't seem to be nearly as effective a glue as it should be. Perhaps our oddball notions of amore, descended as they are from the antique practices of chivalry whereby medieval knights and aristocrats codified their philandering, is simply unsuited for the hard and pragmatic task of marriage-building; we are too much Lancelot and Guinevere and not enough Ozzie and Harriet. Probably, our failure as good married people is more a reflection of our reckless individualism, desire for novelty, overdeveloped fantasy lives, solipsistic definitions of need and desire, and our inability to see relationship maintenance as the tedious and sacrificial task that it is.

But the alternative, the arranged marriages still common among certain Asian and African civilizations, is hardly suited to our cultural zeitgeist. In America, generation gaps are a truism and parent/child conflict a way of life. Very few teenagers and twentysomethings in our society would be willing to cede to their parents the right to select their mates--especially if, as exists in certain dowry situations in India, the whole process is done on a contractual basis while they are still small children. Let mom and dad pick out your significant other? That's Anathema with a capital "A".

What Weinlick seems to have stumbled upon is the best of both worlds. We do not choose our relatives, 'tis true, but we do choose our friends...and, for many of us, they know us far better than do our parents. They have a perspective and a critical eye where we're concerned--our needs, quirks, strengths, weaknesses--that we often lack in reflection.

If you have trustworthy friends, they will not stick you with someone you found physically unattractive, inordinately neat to your messy or messy to your neat, obsessed with country and disdainful of your preference for heavy metal, etc. For those who have had nightmarish blind-date setups arranged by friends, imagine how much more effective the arrangement would have been if all of your friends and relatives had been present to put their heads together and provide you with the right match.

I'm not sure that circling a date on the calendar, renting a wedding locale, buying want-ad space, and then crossing your fingers that a prospective spouse or two will show up is the proper course of action, but I do like Weinlick's abdication of the selection process in favor of those who know him best. Particularly if there are enough of them to create a balanced and thoughtful consensus, those who love you the most are less apt to let you down than you are to let yourself down.

For his part, the groom (obviously relieved that the fetching Ms. Runze was not voted down by some great-aunt determined to marry him off to a bridal contestant with the dreaded "good personality" as her primary attribute), described himself as "elated" and called the wedding "an enormous success." The bride seemed to concur. "I can hardly stand, much less talk. This is the most incredible day of my life."

You'd think that the bride's parents would be more antagonistic to the scheme than the father of the groom, but then you'd think wrong. Annette Runze said of her daughter, "She's very serious about it. She's very committed to the idea, and so is he. They'll probably be married 67 years." Weinlick's mother was also in the couple's corner; "I really have enjoyed this, much to my surprise."

Since Minnesota requires a three-day waiting period for a marriage to become official, there remained a window of opportunity for one or both of them to back out. Since the wire services neglected to augment the story in succeeding days, the gawking public was led to assume that everything proceeded as is normal on the wedding night and that the two intrepid participants in the sui generis nuptials are now off and running in their lives together as Mr. and Mrs. Weinlick.

One can't help but wonder, though, if they picked the spot for their honeymoon by spinning a globe and stopping it with a pointed finger.

CAPTAIN SPAULDING

E-Mail CaptainSpaulding

Previous Mountaintop Experiences with Captain Spaulding:

Hooray For Me #28-- And Now: Our National Anathema

Hooray For Me #27-- Seinfeld: The Last Laugh's On You

Hooray For Me #26-- Sympathy Cards in the Offing

Hooray For Me Archives, Including Volumes 1-25

Back To Your Regularly Scheduled Pandemonium Online