Why Groomzillas Are Rare

Tucked into that Wellesley High School commencement speech/epic rant that people are talking about today — let’s call it the “you’re nothing special” speech –is a mini rant about weddings. English teacher David McCullough Jr. called commencement “life’s great forward-looking ceremony” and contrasted commencements with weddings, which are “one-sided and insufficiently effective.”

“Weddings,” explained McCullough, “are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy.”

If weddings were a more masculine affair, McCullough argued, they would be “after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator.”

He decided to take that sports metaphor and run with it: “[S]tatistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.”

Nor was this an entirely throw-away opening. In the advice portion of the address, he tells the graduating class, “Don’t bother with work you don’t believe in any more than you would a spouse you’re not crazy about, lest you too find yourself on the wrong side of a Baltimore Orioles comparison.”

Now, I think the work part is actually pretty terrible advice, especially in this crap economy. Kids today ought to be grabbing for every advantage they can find, and, yes, that’s often going to include taking jobs they don’t “believe in” as they seek to improve their lot.

But a female friend added an interesting wrinkle about the wedding stuff that I’m embarrassed didn’t occur to me. After I read her that part of the speech, she said, “He’s obviously recently been divorced.” Are any readers familiar enough with Wellesley to know if that happens to be true?