Wedding Day Blues

What seems to be missing here? There was an episode a little while ago of How I Met Your Mother wherein the characters Lily and Marshall were soon to be married. Okay. But there were planning on living apart for the two weeks before the wedding so that their wedding night would be more special. They had been living together for, apparently, several years.

Why, guys? What's your point? You've already done the marriage thing (which demonstrates quite well how much the characters actually care about marriage) so why pretend you haven't? This question hasn't even begun to approach the usual religious aspects of the issue, either. It would not be the first time that you've been with each other in that manner. The very desire to think anything else is a fraud.

To be sure, the desire is understandable. At one time your wedding night was supposed to be the first night of your lives together. But what's the point of sentiment once broken? We're not even talking about a couple who once, in the heat of the moment, shall we say, forgot themselves. We're talking about a couple who have given themselves to each other many times yet trying to pretend there was nothing special about it. Absurd. The absurdity was further compounded by the fact that couple ended up secretly spending the nights in a hotel because 'they couldn't be away from each other'. That, in fact, was used as a bizarre justification for their marriage.

Even as the show is a comedy, the entire situation was inane (yes, the pun is intentional, BTW). Either marriage and sex are at least somewhat sacred or they are not. This is the result of both being taken for granted by the secular world. When that is the case, what difference does it make about when folks have sex or get hitched? Yet we wonder why the morals and discipline of the world are in decay. Attitudes like Lily and Marshall's, and there are many of Lilys and Marshalls around these days, offer an almost perfect demonstration why.