Marriage and the Spectacular

Stacia Brown has been watching cool wedding ads, like the Subaru ad above, and the experience has led her to ponder why she is still single:

I haven’t married, in part, because of this. I am expecting something more spectacular than I’ve experienced.

My first reaction to this was to gag, but really I have no interest in judging Stacia Brown. If she can't imagine being happy without feeling overwhelming love and excitement, then she should stay single. In our age there is no reason why anyone has to get married.

But the idea that people can be so moved by advertising that uses wonderful wedding images to sell stuff that they change what they expect in love and marriage is quite disturbing to me. Are we so cut off from any other models of life -- family, friends, community, novels -- that we draw our expectations from advertising?

Certainly not all of us do; here is a commenter on Brown's blog:

See, when I watch those commercials, my reaction is completely different. I don’t see real people; even when I tried to watch them through the lens of this piece, all I see is a fantasy being sold. Things like this were not really part of my thought process when I got married- I figured, we’re both flawed now, we’ll continue to be (and hark! we have), but we work well together and are likely to continue to. I don’t know that it would be fair to either of us to place expectations for undying passion and romance on one another (especially since we plan to have kids at some point!) and I think that I’d have been much more wary about getting married had the decision only been about the emotional side of love rather than also looking in a very pragmatic way about who we fundamentally are.

Which actually sounds a little cold and practical to me, but at least she didn't get her ideas from car commercials.