I Do... Hate You

I get the Sunday Times. When news of Iraq, Iran, Darfur, North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Kashmir, Congo, Chechnya, and Israel becomes too much for me -- not to mention the health care, economic, energy, environmental, and cultural crises that make up the “National Report” -- I turn to the marriage announcements in the Sunday Styles section. Then I get more depressed.

In theory, the three or four pages of vows -- with their anecdotes of courtship and romance and photos of smiling couples, their happy faces touching -- provide the only regular dose of cheer in the paper. In actuality, these theoretically happy announcements just make you feel worse about your own life. I promise you. The anecdotes of courtship and romance make you bitter that you don’t have an anecdote like that yourself, and the happy couples smiling at you are invariably better looking than you and your hypothetical-future spouse will ever be, even if you did have an anecdote like theirs to begin with.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of letting these theoretically happy people share their happiness with you, here is what a typical New York Times marriage announcement looks like:

Hannah Alexandra Shapiro, the daughter of Dr. Larry R. Shapiro and Melinda S. Shapiro of Great Neck, N.Y., was married yesterday to Dr. Tucker Harrison DeWitt IV, the son of Tucker Harrison DeWitt III and Cindy Janet DeWitt of Greenwich, Conn., at the Gables Yacht Club in Coral Gables, Fla. Rabbi David G. Axelrod officiated.

The bride and bridegroom met at Princeton, from which they graduated, she summa cum laude and he magna cum laude.

Mrs. DeWitt, 26, is an associate at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. She received a law degree from Yale and was previously a clerk for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court. The bride’s father is the chief of anesthesiology at the Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream, N.Y. Her mother is the vice president of news broadcasting at CBS.

Mr. DeWitt, 27, is a neurosurgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He received a Ph.D.-M.D. combined degree from Harvard. The bridegroom’s father was president and CEO of Morgan-Stanley. His mother co-directs the DeWitt Foundation, which was founded by the bridegroom’s father, who also serves as a co-director.

There’s good reason to hate these announcements, to use them as the protective layer between the litter box and the floor, as I do. With the exception of a few that include anecdotes about how the couple fell in love or how the guy proposed, which are even more nauseating than the boring ones (yes, I’m talking to you, Matthew Lance Slonim, who left an envelope entitled “The Quest for Yes” in your woman’s cell phone, a quest that ultimately took her on a flight across five states and ended in her grandfather’s nursing-home room, where Mr. Slonim was waiting, ring in hand -- cue index finger, open mouth, & gagging sound), every announcement lists the same prosaic details in the same prosaic prose. Do you think we care that Richard Primus went to Harvard? The dude’s 37. He graduated when the first Bush was president. Telling us where he went to college is akin to what they do at NBA games when they announce the starting lineups, and they say, “…out of Duke, Luol Deng!” Luol Deng is not “out of Duke.” He played one year at Duke. He is out of Sudan. Tell us something interesting about Richard Primus instead. Something unique, something criminal. Tell us how he received that eight-inch-long scar on his leg on an African hunting safari. Tell us why he made eight trips to Bangkok in a three-year span during the mid-‘90s. Tell us how many chicks (and guys) he banged before scoring with the lucky bride. Tell us anything other than the fact that his mother is a retired allergist and clinical immunologist who practiced in Groton, Conn.

Then there are the ones that make you wonder why they’re in the Times at all. Oftentimes the couple’s connection to the Tri-State Area is tenuous at best. The groom can be from California and the bride from Texas, the wedding was on Key West, and the couple will be settling in Chicago… and they post in the Times because the bride’s stepfather lives in Poughkeepsie. Cut us a break, will ya. Just invite the stepfather and leave it at that.

There. Now you hate them too. And so far I’ve only offered you small potatoes as fodder. Here are the big potatoes, my friend, potatoes big enough to be used for the au gratin served at a 250-guest reception at the Waldorf:

Mostly, you hate these people for the same reasons you hate Derek Jeter or Scarlett Johansson: for being young and rich and successful and talented, and for being far more attractive than someone who is young and rich and successful and talented deserves to be. You hate them for going to Princeton, like approximately one-third of the people getting married in the New York metropolitan area did. (The other two-thirds went to Harvard or Dartmouth. And once, there was a chick from USC.) You hate them for having their whole perfect lives perfectly planned out by the time they’re 27. And yes, admit it: you hate these newlyweds for announcing their newlyweddedness to the world in the first place.

So say it with me! Sing it from the altar of your 400-square-foot studio where you live -- alone:

Fuck you, Daniel Yaron Maman -- sorry, Dr. Daniel Yaron Maman -- for being a 28-year-old plastic surgeon with an MBA from Oxford, and for marrying an absolute hottie like Stacey Robin Harris despite obviously being a giant nerd yourself. And fuck you, Victoria Kathryn Potterton, who, after finishing at Dartmouth, are now graduating from Yale, at 26, with a combined medical and MBA degree. And fuck you, also, for holding the wedding at the Yale Club, whatever that is.

Fuck you, Yus -- yeah, you, Helena Yu and Anthony Yu -- who begin your medical residencies next month at Penn, and who coordinated your life together so expertly that you married partners with the same last name. And fuck you, Andy Bellin, the author of Poker Nation, whose mother was a model with Wilhelmina Models in the 1960s, and whose maternal grandmother, Countess Alicia Spaulding Paolozzi (I am not making this up, I swear), helped Gian Carlo Menotti found the Spoleto Festival USA and also drove for the winning women’s team in the 1958 automotive Tour de France (automotive Tour de France?).

Fuck you, John Marter Timken Jr., for being a descendant of John Adams and J.P. Morgan. Fuck you, Boji Wong and Benjamin Berkman, for having David Dinkins officiate your wedding even though he couldn’t even handle the duties himself (a rabbi/cantor also took part, presumably because Dinkins needed brushing up on his Hebrew chanting). And fuck you, Minor Myers III, for being named Minor Myers III, and also for getting married at Anderson House, the home of the Society of the Cincinnati, "an association of the descendants of officers in the American Revolutionary War, of which you are a member."

I hope you all get divorced.