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Zachary Sparks
Sarah Layden
English Composition
8 September 2009
The Odd Wedding
Throughout my lifetime I have tried to live my life the way that I feel is best for myself. This
concept of living for yourself seems to be more prevalent in today’s society than ever before. I have had
many instances in my lifetime that I feel have made me a unique compared to everybody else. They
most memorable thing that I can think of that I feel makes me unique was my cousins wedding last fall.
I think that in society that everybody sees weddings as falling in love with your soul mate. The
only thing is that people always expect your soul mate to be the same age as you or close to it. This
however was not the case for my cousins wedding. For starters, my cousin didn’t just marry woman that
he has known for a long time, he broke the societal norm and married a girl that was 11 years younger
than him. I personally do not think that it is wrong for someone to marry a person who is significantly
younger than them because you shouldn’t have to only marry someone who is close to the same age as
you. This is only the very beginning of my tale of the weird wedding because I would soon find out how
it could possibly get any weirder.
Before last year anytime that I heard that somebody is having a wedding I always imagined it
being in the spring or summer when it is sunny outside and I always pictured there being lots of white.
My cousins wedding would change my perspective of this forever. My cousin got married in late
September at about the same time that all of the leaves on trees would change colors and it would start
to get cold outside. I can’t help but remember how I thought that they were crazy for doing this because
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their wedding was partially outside. I couldn’t help but laugh under my breath when I saw all of the
bridesmaids and every girl that wore heels start to sink in the mud outside. The thing that perhaps
shocked me the most about this wedding was the theme and location.
When you think of weddings you probably don’t think that it’s going to take place in a haunted
house, or at least that was what I thought. My cousin however must have thought a little bit differently.
When my parents told me that my cousin was going to have a masquerade wedding at the Hannah
House I remember just laughing and saying, “no seriously where are they having it?” I couldn’t believe
what I had just heard. How could my cousin get married in a haunted house? Why would he want
everybody to wear masks? I was truly at awe. This notion of a wedding in the fall at a haunted house
changed my view of a traditional wedding completely.
During the wedding the bride wore red and the groom wore an all black tux with a red bowtie. I
remember seeing a paid actor pretending to be a joker from the medieval era. This wedding truly looked
like a masquerade ball that you would find in a movie. At the end of the wedding when we were all
walking away my cousin caught up with me and asked me how I liked the wedding and the house. When
I started to think about it I realized that it was honestly the most fun that I had had at a wedding,
because it was so unusual. He opened my eyes to not conforming to other peoples standards.
It was after this wedding that I realized that lots of people in today’s society are not conforming
to old traditions. In the book Generation Me the author talks about how many people today are
changing the traditions on how to get married. Today’s society is becoming bolder in their actions by
marrying people they like and not listening to racial bounds and age differences. I think that my cousin’s
wedding shows that people today are becoming bolder. In Generation Me the author says that in the
1960’s the only correct colors for a wedding were white, cream, and ivory. My cousin broke that norm
because he decided to wear black and red top his wedding. In today’s society it is okay for people to be
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more unique because we as a nation have finally started to realize that you only get to live life once so
you should live it to make yourself happy.