Faux Weddings: Here Comes the (Fake) Bride
All those wedding-related Facebook updates every Monday are becoming despairingly routine: engagement announcements, engagement photos, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, the actual wedding, even the honeymoon.
Okay we get it. They are starting a new chapter in their lives with one or two years of social media activity leading up to the big event. It’s understandable. But it’s also a sad generational trend that lacks authenticity. And it's so typical of a generation widely considered to be essentially narcissistic.
Now faux weddings are the thing, at least in some places. In Argentina, it has become a huge trend among twenty and thirty-somethings. A fake wedding company called Falsa Boda was founded in Argentina and faux weddings have become widely accepted there. The decline in real weddings may have something to do with the demand for nuptial fantasy, especially among women. According to Oddity Central, some 22,000 couples tied the knot in Buenos Aires in 1990, but by 2013 that number had dropped to to only 11,642 couples.
What happens at faux weddings? Guests pay about $50 to attend and weddings often attract 600 to 700 guests. They act out their roles at the wedding and reception even though they don't even know the fake bride and groom. The happy couple are also hired to act out their parts in the fake ceremony. There is even drama when someone stops the ceremony as if on set of a soap opera.
The scary thing is, I can totally see this faux wedding thing spreading beyond one South American country. It’s not just the narcissism of today’s twenty-somethings driven by social gratification. It’s also the larger trend of divorce rates increasing and views on marriage in general causing it to become so...plastic.
As Time magazine noted about our generation’s view on weddings: “We’re cynical. We are a generation raised on a wedding industry that could fund a small nation, but marriages that end before the ink has dried…We are also less religious than any other generation, meaning we don’t enter (or stay) committed simply for God. We feel less bound to tradition as a whole (no bouquet tosses here)…we are a generation that is overwhelmed by options, in everything from college and first jobs to who we should choose for a partner”.
Even with this cynicism towards long-term marriages and tradition, the amount of money spent on weddings, and the events leading up to them, is on par with a down payment on a mortgage. It’s all about putting on a show--with validation from the FB likes and hashtags. And now Falsa Boda in Argentina actually puts on that show for those who want to go through the motions of being a guest at a wedding rather than actually attending a real wedding.
Even at my small university in Southern Connecticut where I attended undergrad—Fairfield University—it’s an annual tradition for the seniors to put on a “mock wedding”. This is a bit different, involving the sloppiest duo from the graduating class to play bride and groom and throwing a big party just for the hell of it. Not sure where this started at Fairfield, but it’s more of a joke on the actual “wedding show” with photos and updates on our social media feeds post-graduation.
It has also, in some regard, come to Paris. It's routine for Chinese and Japanese couples to come to Paris for the sole purpose of getting their wedding pictures taken in the city of love. They come to the City of Light to create their nuptials event, either before or after the real wedding.
I predict this faux wedding thing getting bigger, spreading farther, and becoming a normal alternative to attending an actual wedding among our generation. Authenticity will be thrown out the window. Let’s just put on a show for the hell of it.
It’s a sad and unfortunate break from longstanding traditions. But it is what it is. Because #YOLO.
[Video 1: Youtube, Image: Vimeo, Video 2: Oddity City]
