How To Be A Stress-Free Wedding Guest

by Rebecca Wright

Exhibit A in the knock-down-drag-out category: Kevin, 26, an IT coordinator, and Celia, 26, a pharmacist, had been together for two years before attending their first wedding, where they succumbed to that most obvious of pitfalls—the open bar. After what Kevin describes as “too many glasses of red wine,” and Celia reckons was “the equivalent of my blood supply” in booze, they decided to discuss Celia’s traditional Church-of-England upbringing versus Kevin’s agnosticism.

Cut to full-scale drunken row.

They patched things up the next day, though, and soon their wedding-battle wounds became merit badges. When Celia slipped a disc and Kevin was sent to Singapore for work, the religion issue faded in significance. A little over a year later, in the place they first met—a summer music festival in Essex—Kevin went down on bended knee, in the mud, amongst the cigarette butts and empty pint glasses, to offer Celia a plastic ring from one of the stalls. “I feel sure that I want to marry Celia, what with getting through the fight at the first wedding and all,” says Kevin.

Attending a few more friends’ weddings gave Celia similar confidence. “It made it less scary,” Celia adds. “I started to think that maybe I wasn’t too young to get married and maybe I will still have a life and my personality won’t be sapped out of me in a bid to find the perfect matching curtains and bed linen.”

In fact, she and Kevin are now happily throwing themselves into the line of fire. “I’ve started to find going to weddings with Celia a romantic experience, especially the actual ceremony,” he says. The couple admits to “holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, and giggling,” during the last celebration they attended. (They will marry this September, in Surrey.)