Tonight I attended the wedding of my chica, a wonderful young woman who has been my friend since we were in kindergarten. This was, in many ways, the first wedding I have really been to, though I have been physically present at others in the past; this was the first wedding where I felt my eyes burn and my throat get tight as the vows were read, the first where my cheeks were sore from smiling so long and so hard.

I've never been much for weddings, to be honest. Sure, the food is usually pretty outstanding, and bridesmaids have their own not-so-subtle charm, but there's always a fearful concentration of relatives wandering about and offering drunken congratulations to anybody too slow to escape. Other than a bunch of blenders, floral china, and tax exemptions, there's not much in the way of direct reward for the whole process, and those few perks hardly enough to distract from the excruciating reality of matrimonial "bliss." Once the honeymoon is over you wind up doing pretty much exactly what you would be doing if you hadn't married but had just shacked up in sin together, only you blew five years' rent money on what amounted to a slightly over-large dinner party.

I really haven't the temperment for marriage. I don't like to share, I am extremely territorial, I boast a perverse and hostile sense of humor, and I have more trust issues that Teddy Roosevelt. (Any AP American students get that reference?) Perhaps I am merely anticipating the inevitable by rejecting marriage, since the likelihood of anybody putting up with me for an period of more than 8 hours at a stretch is...well, just ask my brother, once he's gotten free of the little "surprise" I left in his closet.

But my safely cynical world was shaken when I watched my oldest friend exchange small loops of precious metal with the man she has chosen for a partner. Unexpected feelings flooded the jealously cultivated cactus of my heart. Is there any way to accept such cliched joys as weddings and marriage, while still maintaining a dignified level of misathropy? These next years will be the test, as I watch my friends cartwheel recklessly off the springboard of matrimony, and as I myself perhaps come face-to-face with my inner demons of compassion and (shudder) romance.