Couples renewing their vows? I'm blaming the Internet.
This is a piece I wrote on assignment for the The New York Times. It is about vow renewal ceremonies, so it doesn’t really have to do with obsolescence. And yet…it does.
I’m not going to comment on the notion of whether or not marriage is obsolete. Having only recently entered into the institution myself, I am pulling for it to remain relevant. However, it’s clear that the reasons why marriage last today aren’t necessarily what they were. I touched on that in this article.
Beyond that, I do think that advances in technology are part of the reason that couples, celebrity and otherwise, are choosing to renew their vows. Chiefly, I blame the advances that have obliterated the daily or weekly news cycle in favor of an hourly one, and the many miraculous inventions that led to the obsolescence of printed photos.
Twenty-four hour celebrity news feeds keep tabs on every new engagement ring, wedding, baby bump, and sleek postpartum bod. It’s the kind of filler that produces the photos of happy couples that publicists dream of seeing on magazine covers flanking the checkout aisle. Celebrities in wedding dresses are filler-ific. Never gets old. Even if it’s the second time she’s being seen in said dress. In other words, it’s an easy way to manufacture good press.
This need to over document the good times filters down to us regular folk. With Facebook, people are becoming their own publicists, curating what others think about their lives. And who wants to represent themselves as having kids with bad acne and a wedding picture that looks 1988-ish?
Up until very recently, if you had a vow renewal or any other kind of event of that nature, the photos would only ever be seen by people who had access to the album stored on a particle-board shelf in a spare bedroom. I wonder if our new ability to share photos of ourselves constantly encourages people to construct these kinds of lavish, much photographed events. The fact that the images can be disseminated to old high school boyfriends in real time suggests the potential for the kind of unspoken drama and etiquette-based plot vehicles that make one wish Jane Austen were alive, well, and living in Brooklyn.
