Have you ever noticed how a wedding asks you to bring only one part of yourself?
The part that’s happy for them. The part that dances, raises a glass, cries at the vows in the socially acceptable way. There’s an unspoken rule at most weddings that every guest is there to be merry and celebrate the couple, and that anything else you might be carrying should be left in the car with your coat.
I understand the rule. I just don’t think it works.
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At a wedding not long ago, I sat next to a dear friend whose father had recently died of cancer. The music changed, everyone stood, and the bride’s father began walking her down the aisle.
I reached over and squeezed my friend’s hand. Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to.
And I remember looking around at the rows of guests, all of them smiling and turned toward the aisle, and wondering how many other people in that room were also somewhere else entirely, watching a father they no longer had, or a marriage of their own that didn’t survive, or a person they had loved and lost, or a love they were starting to suspect might never arrive at all.
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Jung believed that certain human experiences are archetypal. They’re older than any one of us, shared across cultures and centuries, and they carry a charge that reaches far below conscious thought. Birth, death, coming of age, union. When we encounter them, something in us responds that has very little to do with the specific people involved.
A wedding is one of these. Probably one of the most charged we still have.
Jung wrote at length about the coniunctio, the sacred union of opposites, which he saw as one of the deepest images of wholeness the psyche knows. Two becoming one. Whether or not you’ve ever read a word of Jung, you feel this at a wedding. It’s why people who barely know the couple still tear up during the vows.
But every union is also a separation. That’s the part we don’t talk about.
The father walking down the aisle is also letting go. The sister in the front row is, in some quiet way, losing the version of her sibling who belonged mostly to the family. The mother is witnessing the end of something even as she celebrates the beginning of something else. A wedding is a threshold, and thresholds have two sides.
And when we stand near someone else’s threshold, our own tend to come up. The ones we crossed. The ones we never got to. The ones that were taken from us.
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So the guest who is “just there to celebrate” is never only that.
They might be grieving a parent who won’t be at their own wedding. They might be newly divorced, or quietly unhappy in a marriage that once looked exactly like this one. They might be single in a way that has started to feel less like a season and more like a sentence. They might have lost a partner. They might be watching a sibling or a best friend walk into a life that will inevitably have less room for them. They might feel envy, and then shame about the envy, and then exhaustion from managing both...etc.
None of this means they aren’t happy for the couple. (Most of the time they genuinely are.) It means they’re human, and that a ceremony this symbolically loaded is going to touch more than one place in them at once.
In Jungian terms, the cheerful wedding guest is a persona. Not a dishonest one. But a persona can only hold so much, and whatever doesn’t fit inside it doesn’t disappear. It goes into shadow. And shadow has a way of finding the exit.
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Which brings me to something I’ve been wondering about for a while. I’ll offer it as a hypothesis, because that’s what it is.
I wonder if some of the heavy drinking at weddings is what happens when those feelings have nowhere to go.
Not all of it, necessarily. Some of it is just celebration, and some of it is just an open bar. But I’ve watched it happen enough times, at weddings I’ve attended and in the stories clients bring into my office afterward, that I’ve started to notice a pattern. The tears that come too fast after the third drink. The argument at the end of the night that seems to come out of nowhere. The guest who was fine all day and then, very suddenly, isn’t.
Jung had something to say about this too. Late in his life he wrote to Bill Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, suggesting that the craving for alcohol might be, at its root, a misdirected thirst for wholeness. A spiritual longing looking for relief in the wrong place. He summed it up with a Latin phrase I’ve never been able to forget: spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit.
Robert A. Johnson, one of my favorite Jungian writers, made a related argument in his book Ecstasy. He suggested that modern life has very few places left for genuine ecstatic experience, the kind of full-bodied, overflowing feeling that ancient rituals were built to hold, and that alcohol often becomes a stand-in for it. Something that loosens the edges without actually letting us feel what’s underneath.
I think about that at weddings. A room full of people standing at the edge of something enormous, being told to only feel the happy part. And then a bar.
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I’m not writing this to make anyone feel bad about having fun at a wedding. Please have fun at weddings.
I’m writing it because I think there’s another way to be a guest. One where you’re allowed to bring all of yourself.
It might look like noticing, privately, that the father-daughter dance is going to be hard for you, and letting it be hard. It might look like stepping outside for a few minutes, not to escape, but to let something move through you before you go back in. It might look like squeezing someone’s hand. It might look like crying during the vows and knowing, without needing to explain it to anyone, that the tears are about more than the couple.
None of that takes anything away from them. If anything, it honors what a wedding actually is. Not just a party. A ritual, and one of the few collective rituals we have left that still asks us to stand together in the presence of love, and loss, and time, and the strange fact that every beginning is also an ending.
A ritual like that was always meant to hold the whole of us.
And I’ve learnt that we tend to leave lighter, not heavier, when we let it.
