Turn on the TV, boot up your home page or pass a magazine rack and you're assaulted every which way about the overblown event -- William and Kate's guest list, their music choices, their honeymoon destination and speculation about a change in the succession rules.
Count me among those who won't be getting up before dawn to watch the spectacle.
Leave it to Leonard Pitts Jr., my favorite newspaper columnist, to bring some badly perspective to it all. In his column, "Abundant blessings for the newlyweds," Pitts cites the conventional wisdom that we are living in a time of lowered expectations and pessimism about the future, and notes that marriage itself is becoming a rarity.
"To get married is to make a bet on always and forever. To stay married is a function of will and work, even more than of love. The capacity and willingness to make that bet, to put in that work, to bear down with that will, are slowly disappearing from American life. Fifty years ago, close to 70 percent of all American adults were married. Now it's about 54. Britain has seen similar trends. We marry less, we marry later, we make marriage a reality show, we see our cynicism validated by Hollywood marriages that pop like soap bubbles.I have nothing against the royal couple. But until reading Pitts, I confess I was blind to the fact that maybe, just, maybe, I'd have one thing in common with young William -- a public declaration to promise myself to one person. An act of faith. An act of defiance.
"A wedding, then, is not just an act of faith, but also one of defiance."
Photograph: www.bittenandbound.com
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