Wedding Tests, a Dangerous Trend
Word reaches these shores from India of a young bride-to-be who left her betrothed at the altar because he couldn’t answer a question that she had sprung on him.
This wasn’t the type of query you might expect under the circumstances, such as ‘you ready to get this show on the road, chum?’ or even ‘your guy did remember to bring the ring, right? Right?’
Nor was it the type of question meant to merely pass the time while waiting for the whole wedding machinery to engage, so to speak, such as ‘man, can you believe the things that some people wear to a wedding?’
No, by way of these reports, the implication is that it was a math question.
A math question.
She sought, again by way of these newspaper stories, to establish the young man’s intelligence and thus his suitability for marriage. She apparently could think of no better way to rank the fellow than to pepper him with questions of a quantitative nature.
Put yourself in the young groom’s position.
Here he is, thinking that he is just about to cross the finish line, mere minutes away from a life of wedded bliss, and then the object of his adoration turns casually to him and asks by the bye, “in the xy plane, the graph of which of the following equations is a line with a slope of 3?”
A) Y = 1/3 x
B) Y = x-3
C) Y = 3x + 2
D) Y = 6x + 3
This isn’t what the young man is expecting. He had thought she was leaning forward to whisper sweet nothings in his ear, and I would call this math problem just about the opposite of a sweet nothing. It has the tang of something more like a job application or IQ test.
We have to imagine that the gal has a soft spot for the lad – after all, she was all prepared to marry him! – and so she might in her kindness repeat. “Is it….
E) Y = 1/3 x
F) Y = x-3
G) Y = 3x + 2
H) Y = 6x + 3
…while looking at him expectantly. Does she seek to convey with her eyes or her voice the correct answer? I like to think so, but remember, she’s the one that came up with this scheme to begin with. It doesn’t seem to spring from an overly sentimental approach to life’s big decisions.
Many a man, much less a groom on his wedding day and within the wedding hour, will be thrown for a loop by a question like this.
It comes at him out of the blue! It’s hard to keep all these figures straight in his head! These last 24 hours have not been a period of preparation for test-taking.
Instead he has been planning the honeymoon, looking for apartments, finalizing the menu for the reception, memorizing his lines for the ceremony proper. With his head full of details like this, is it any wonder that he gropes for an answer and in fact, delivers the wrong one?
Dissatisfied with his answer, and true to her master plan, the girl walks away, in the manner of one unwilling to buy a major appliance without some sort of warranty.
You may question her sense of timing, you may even have wished that she had given the poor fellow a reading comprehension or an essay question instead of a math question, but you cannot question the underlying grit of her determination.
He’s a nice guy! Don’t get her wrong! She wishes him the best! But if he can’t answer a simple question like that how in the world can she make something of him in the coming years?
This is not a trend that we can afford to let take hold more broadly.
A hard-eyed look at the actual qualities of the average male marriage candidate does not work to the benefit of most grooms.
Society not only accepts that there is a certain willed hopefulness, a certain generous overestimation of the groom’s personal qualities on the part of the brides-to-be, but counts on it.
Darwin would tell us, I think, that if mating rituals included the frank assessment of the intelligence level of the male of the species, Mother Nature would take its course and the breed would soon die out.
This is not to say that eventually many men don’t come to fill the initial starry-eyed assessment of their betrothed, but this can take the better part of a century to take hold. No fresh groom can stand that kind of scrutiny, indeed, few men at all can.
It’s a bracing thought, or terrifying, or something, for a young man to consider on his way up to the altar that he must remember not only the name of the girl’s father, stepfather, mother, stepmother, grandmother, several brothers and a double helping of aunts, but the name of the bride herself, a name that he has been known to misplace temporarily in moments of stress.
This ought to be enough.
Now he is told that he must also have ready at hand the Pythagorean Theorem, the furthest reaches of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and a solid understanding of the nature of gaseous particles in a closed container under the influence of Brownian motion.
And it might not stop there.
You know how these things are, these big sweeping social changes that upend the world. At one moment it is a matter strictly between the bride and groom, the next everyone and their brother is trying to get in on the act.
The minister or priest or justice of the peace, a person who has seen a lot of human suffering and error, ought by rights to be the type of individual to overlook certain shortcomings in personal brights at a time like this.
How bitter it is then when he looks over at the groom in the way of someone about to ask an important question such as the whole ‘do you promise to have and to hold,’ business and instead says, “name all fifty states and their capitals….in alphabetical order.”
And if the groom makes it past that hurdle, it is followed by the always tense moment when the conductor of the ceremony asks if anyone in the crowd has an objection, which opens up the possibility of someone standing up and declaring, “I don’t particularly have an objection,…unless, that is, the groom cannot explain the difference between the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan sonnet form, giving several examples of each with a particular emphasis on their rhyme scheme.’
The marriage ceremony under these circumstance seems less like an occasion for joyous celebration and more like a mix of a TV game show and one of the more excessive Roman gladiatorial competitions.
And there is no guarantee that these practices won’t move further upstream. When the nervous young man arrives to pick up the girl for their first date it is intimidating to be met by a glowering father who says “now what do you do for a living, young man?”
How much worse it would be if he followed that up with a query about the Magna Carta, asking for specific focus upon the economic threats to the feudal organization of society.
The mother in the other room comes out smiling, perhaps drying her hands, “you must be Janie’s new friend! Tell me the first twelve elements in the Periodic Table. Extra credit if you can give me the atomic weight of each.”
The prospect of these episodes weighs on a young man.
It is enough to send a fellow to his favorite watering hole where he can finally find some peace and quiet.
Shaken by the circumstances of the day the discarded groom staggers blankly into a dark friendly place and, going all out, says to his server, “Might I have one of your excellent cheeseburgers with fries, medium well, along with a glass of, nay, an entire schooner of sarsaparilla?”
“Of course you can,” the server replies courteously, but then pauses as he seems to think of something on the way to placing the order in the kitchen window.
“As soon as you can tell me the underlying issues behind the imposition of The Stamp Act upon the American colonies, the dates of its passage and eventual repeal, and its impact upon the Revolutionary War several years later. Cite your references in footnote form if you would.”
