The wedding boyfriend

It's a peculiar phenomenon. You hook up with someone at the rehearsal dinner and by Sunday brunch you've enacted all of the stages of courtship -- speeded up.

Editor's note: This story is part of our continuing series on marriage.

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Nov. 4, 2003 | I am, according to my friend Susanna, a wedding ho. In the last five years, I've gone to every wedding I've been invited to -- 12 in total. My so-called wedding vow started after two college classmates married each other in the summer of 1997. I decided not to go to the wedding because it was across the country, because my then-boss didn't want me to take time off, and because I had grown apart from the friends I'd once shared with the bride and groom. And since it was going to be a Mormon wedding, it wasn't even like the awkwardness could be smoothed over with booze.

But afterward, after I hadn't gone, I regretted it. Even though weddings are in many ways ridiculous -- people spend vast sums of money to act out corny and antiquated rituals in a frenzied setting -- they still mean something. They're an act of optimism, a time when people come together for happy rather than unhappy reasons. And I hadn't been there.

Since then, repentant, I have attended weddings in Florida and Rhode Island and Oregon, in New Hampshire and South Carolina and California. I have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars buying gifts on the Crate and Barrel Web site -- surely, if the store had a frequent flier equivalent, by now I'd be entitled to an entire Calphalon Contemporary Nonstick Cookware Set ($299.95, oven safe to 450 degrees). And, in my faithful attendance of the weddings themselves, I have had ample opportunity both to observe and to participate in all the behaviors associated with a phenomenon known as the wedding boyfriend. (Please note: "The wedding boyfriend" exists in many permutations depending upon your own gender and sexual orientation. He also answers to the name of wedding girlfriend.)

Here's how it works: You go, dateless, to a wedding. You start hanging out with a particular guy, also a single wedding guest. You can, but don't have to, hook up with him; the only requirement is that the question of whether you'll hook up must exist, hanging there like champagne bubbles. Ideally, you meet your wedding boyfriend at the rehearsal dinner and then your relationship -- your minirelationship -- can unfold over the next 36 hours. Even if you don't meet your wedding boyfriend until the reception, the wedding boyfriend is still the person who, for you, defines the wedding. It's the unique structure of the wedding weekend that allows for these compressed relationships. "With the rehearsal dinner [and] wedding back to back, you've greased the skids for familiarity with people," says Scott, a 33-year-old law school professor in Washington. (All names have been changed to protect the single and still-looking.) "It's pretty rare, if you think about it, to go out on consecutive nights with people that you've just met. It almost never happens in other circumstances, and when it does happen [at a wedding] you're in some place where you've traveled, so you get this weird combination of vacation and familiarity."

According to Jake, a 33-year-old New York photographer who has ended up in bed with wedding girlfriends at six out of his last six weddings ("At a certain point," he says, "it approached pathology"), the Friday night before a wedding, when various friends typically gather together, "is like the first day of camp. You form your little social circles and everyone figures out who's attracted to whom and what's going on."

Then, once you've found your wedding honey, you get to enact all of the stages of courtship, speeded up: After the meeting and the initial connection comes the bliss, followed by the growing sense that it's about to end, followed by the end itself -- aka the breakup. When you're ripped apart at the conclusion of the weekend -- let's say he's flying home to Dallas, you live in Boston -- you feel disproportionately bereft; you get to luxuriate in the logistical unfairness of it, in the knowledge that surely if you lived in the same city you would start dating immediately. Hell, you'd probably end up married yourselves. Of course, the reality is, it's this very distance, and the ephemerality of the weekend -- plus, often, a lot of alcohol -- that allows people to be so open to a romantic connection in the first place. "It's more safe," says Amanda, a 30-year-old doctor in Philadelphia. "[You don't] actually have to deal after the weekend is over."

Amanda recently found wedding love with a guy who had been preselected for her. Amanda was the best friend of the bride's sister; Ben was the best friend of the groom; both had been hearing about each other for several years. When Amanda pulled into the dirt road leading to the bride's family's house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, Ben and the bride's sister Jill "walked up to meet me and hopped in my car," remembers Amanda. "Jill's like, 'Meet Ben, your date for the weekend.' And he handed me a can of Budweiser." In other words: Ben was an arranged wedding boyfriend. Ben was cute and confident, and he was wearing a John Deere hat that Amanda liked, but she wasn't totally convinced. Then, at a bonfire that evening, "He put his hand on my butt," says Amanda. "I went up to Jill and was like, 'I think I am going to hook up with him.'" Conveniently, Amanda and Ben were not only both sleeping at the bride's family's house but they'd been assigned a bed and a trundle bed a foot apart. However, the romance of the first evening was cut short when Amanda, having had several gin and tonics and not much else for dinner, threw up in her bed. But this turn of events actually allowed Ben, in true wedding boyfriend mode, to show his helpful domestic side -- he proceeded to strip and remake the bed and bring Amanda water.

Next page: Sex with your wedding boyfriend isn't mandatory -- it's more about intensity of feeling