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wedding envy

Peter

Do you ever get wedding envy?

Two of my close friends recently set the date for their wedding and I can’t help but feel a little jealous. It’s been a while since I had any friends get married. I think largely because my friends are not in regular contact with me any more. But in the past I felt a little left out of it when my friends got married. I remember one of the first things one of my closest friends did after leaving uni was get married. I wasn’t even invited which kind of hurt.

Of course I know a part of it is just feeling fed up that all my friends are in serious relationships while I’m not. That and the feeling this is one more way they are leaving me behind.

It doesn’t help and it’s kind of disappointing to see it really doesn’t seem to mean a lot to some of them. It’s almost a box ticking exercise sometimes. I get it if you’re already sharing a bed, a house and a bank account. Maybe marriage doesn’t mean a whole lot in practice. I guess growing up as a child that wasn’t the norm. With my conservative upbringing most of the weddings I attended were young church couples who at least wouldn’t have lived together prior to marrying. So it feels kind of sad to see my friends breeze through the traditions of marriage as if they were formalities. Actually one friend invited me to her hen night. It was like women's institute meeting tbh. I half expected them to pull out their knitting. There was no sense that life would change after this, No last wild night on the town, no real sense of excitement for married life.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Disney mega weddings are stupid. Blowing tons of cash on flowers and decoration. And as a child I hated the unnecessary theater and showiness of it all. Long boring sermons, dull speeches, showing off by hiring string quartets etc. But the traditions around weddings make a lot of sense as coming of age / life transition ceremonies.

  • The stag / hen do, re affirming the friendships you made while single while your friends help you celebrate a new phase in your life. But most of the couples I’ve known treated it more like an obligation they must endure than a celebration of their ending single life and a welcoming of their new married one
  • The prewedding preparation where your friends help you ready yourself and support you. Make you look your best. More of a thing for the bride I guess but I find that quite sad too. Men should be reminded from time to time we are attractive and worth starring at.
  • The gift giving. Practically it just makes sense to help two people found a new home by giving things they will need or can enjoy together. Thoughtful gift giving is a really good way of showing affection. In essence your friends and family are putting together a married life starter kit for you. Except these days it’s mostly just picking of things you want not need from a list online.
  • The tradition of having bridesmaids who are actually single. It’s actually kind of brilliant. At some point in the past someone said of course at a wedding everyone single is going to feel a bit broody and lonely. So why don’t we take a bunch of single women and give them a uniform to indicate that they are available. And let’s make them even more envious by having them hang around the bride for a month or so listening to her gush about getting married. So by the wedding day they’re practically elbowing each other to catch the bouquet. Again from my point of view it’s just a shame we can’t put a target on the single boys backs and get the girls to chase them.

Is it so wrong of me to feel envious? Or disappointed I’m not more involved in the wider wedding traditions? It feels a little bit like my presence there is just one more box ticking exercise.

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  • in reply to Martin

    There has been at least one woman who expressed an interest in me who I rejected. The issue was … well issues really:

    • I didn’t find her physically attractive.
    • in spite of being good friends we didn’t have much in common 
    • she was asexual and i had no interest in being in a permanently sexless relationship.

    so I don’t believe I’ve been ignoring women unless I didn’t really see them as GF material.

  • in reply to Peter

    Neurotypical men can usually tell when there is no chance of reciprocation of attraction. That allows them to move on to other potential romantic partners. I spent a lot of time fixated on women who were never going to feel anything for me, without fully realising the situation was hopeless. At the same time there were others that, in retrospect, did find me attractive, that I ignored. Tunnel vision, of course.

  • in reply to Martin

    Ah my problem used to be rejection. I got brave enough to start asking single girls out. They all said no. Now my problem is isolation. There are no girls in my social circle I would wish to ask out. 

  • in reply to Deleted User

    My problem was a total unwillingness to risk rejection. Once I overcame this I had a mixture of rejection and success, but beforehand there was just nothing, nothing at all. It is impossible to build on nothing, at least rejection yields some information.

  • in reply to Martin

    I don’t know, all of the available women I’ve ever had strong feelings for have rejected me. 

    there  were of course unavailable ones.

    There’s also those I had a lesser  amount of attraction to and I was waiting to see if that attraction would grow as I got to know them better. But I never really got to know them better they kind of fell out of my life.

  • in reply to Martin

    I tried very hard in my teens and twenties but had a 100% rejection rate. I gave up because it was just too painful.

  • in reply to Deleted User

    I came up with my theory of being brave decades before I realised that I was autistic, I was just considering myself and reasons why I had close to zero romantic success. I only recently realised that this possibly had a wider implication for other autistic men  I had a couple of rejections, but was lucky eventually. I realised that my future wife was ideal for me and threw caution to the winds, was very open about my feelings and a certain amount of doggedness - it was a long distance relationship for a few years - paid off in the end.

  • in reply to Martin

    If you don’t mind me asking, did you need to go through a series of rejections before finding your wife?

  • in reply to Peter

    Emotional maturity doesn't preclude epic silliness, as anyone who has seen my scarily life-like ape impression could testify. No, the emotional maturity I mean is in being willing to take emotional risks, to be emotionally available and above all to risk rejection and damage to one's amour propre, in pursuit of a meaningful relationship. I have come to the belief that for autistic men at least, to have a real chance at gaining a romantic relationship of any worth we have to be much braver than our allistic peers. Most allistic men can tell when a woman finds them attractive and they take fewer risks in asking a woman for a date. We have little or no unconscious abilities in that field, so we have to have more courage than they do in order to make an initial romantic overture.