Why Only Gay Couples Should Be Featured in the "Vows" section of the New York Times

Also, older couples.

Can someone help me with this? 

I'm profoundly irritated by the wedding section--"Vows"--of the New York Times.  Every. Single. Sunday.  

I read Philip Galanes's always-enjoyable column, and then  I think, oh, no, the next pages are all about WEDDINGS.  I know what to expect: acres of print devoted to heterosexual college graduates who've tied the knot in event spaces, churches, and gardens. Chatty anecdotes about how they met.

Don't care.  Beyond don't care--I'm exasperated and bored.  Doing the expected thing--is it that hard?  Many of these untried relationships will end in divorce--why pretend any differently? But The Times seems to--the writers play along, recounting it all without a hint of tongue-in-cheek (or are they chortling cynically in the back room?).

The gay couples, on the other hand, have struggled against discrimination, and the older couples know that life can dish up failure but forge ahead anyway in the risky business of getting married.  Reading their stories bucks me up.  Their accomplishments have something to teach us.

Here's a blog post I wrote in June 2012.  Still holds. 



WEDDINGS TO READ ABOUT
June 17, 2012

Today's New York Times has six pages of wedding announcements, June brides and all that.  Most couples are heterosexual and in their 20's or early 30's.  Their faces look unlined and confident.   I think, "yeah, yeah, and good luck to you.  Let's talk in 30 years and see what's happened." 

What interests me--and the only announcements I actually read--are couples who are a) gay and/or  b) in their fifties or beyond,  people who've had some trials and tribulations and are still willing to step off a cliff and hope for the best.  Getting married is easy when you're 25, straight, and doing the expected thing. (Or 27, in my case.)   When you're over 50 and a little worse for the wear, or when presidential candidates are debating your right to marry--that's the story I want to read.

Today's featured couple,  Nancy Coffey and Timothy Nagler, ages 66 and 65 , would seem fall into my sphere of interest, except that she's clearly had lots of cosmetic surgery, so much so that I thought she was 35, and he's lost 50 pounds to please her.  (She said when she met him "he looked like he was pregnant, literally, and he was wearing a pink linen shirt.  He was a sight to behold."  Oh, Nancy!)  So good luck to them, but I hope they can accept the physical realities of being in their sixties.

No, give me come-back weddings; weddings where the bride and groom have imperfect bodies but big, glowing smiles; weddings where the perfectly toned body of the bride isn't draped in Valentino.  And definitely weddings where the Times has to say which bride or which groom in the photo.  Way to go!