SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I WORKED IN PHONE-BASED TECH SUPPORT/CUSTOMER SERVICE for a company that made, among other things, custom-printed books that some people used as mementos for weddings.

Every once in a while I’d get a call from a newly married woman who was having a … well, “fit” doesn’t capture the flavor of the rant directed at me and my company. Her memory book had some sort of problem with the binding, or one or more of the photos came out slightly dark — and now her perfect wedding was ruined!

After one of those calls one day, Jessica, the woman in the cube next to mine who had overheard my end of the call and had been throwing me a sympathetic look, said, “Matt, you’ve got to understand: It’s her day to be a princess.”

Hearing that set me off for some reason, and I said, “If I ever get married, what’s going to be special about that day is that I’m committing to spend the rest of my life with someone I love. That is the most important memory I’ll take away from that day — not how much the reception cost, or what designer made my wife’s dress, or what company made the sterling at the dinner. All that stuff is unnecessary stuff to get stressed out about — in fact, having to watch my wife getting stressed out at having to arrange a hideously expensive and highly choreographed ‘event’ would actually detract from the day.”

I read somewhere that the average American wedding now costs $25,000, and my reaction when I read that is, “That’s absolutely obscene.”

Bridal magazines encourage a kind of almost pornographic fascination with brand-name designers and accessories. The enterprise (and that’s what we’re really talking about here — a business) strikes me, frankly, as being something close to depraved, profaning what should be holy and turning what ought to be an occasion of joy into an exercise in juvenile, narcissistic wish-fulfillment.

Judith Martin (better known as Miss Manners), in her review of Rebecca Mead’s 2007 bestseller, “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding,” wrote (with characteristic starchy wisdom):

“There are economic forces at work, (Mead) argues, that lead brides into serious debt, draft them into spending their long engagements plotting social field maneuvers rather than canoodling with their fiancés, and cajole them into playing out their childish fantasies in front of everyone they know.

“The immediate perpetrator is identified as the $161-billion-a-year American wedding industry led by professional wedding advisers, bridal consultants, and those who run bridal registries (not just at china shops but at hardware stores, ski chalets, mortgage companies and a burgeoning number of other establishments). Together, they have been able to convince presumably otherwise normal women that they must have marathon weddings and all the new possessions they can imagine.

“The doublespeak such business interests use to do this is impressive. ‘Memories’ are not what remains in the mind, but can be retained only with the help of staged photographs and videos. ‘Tradition’ offers a grab bag from any culture, including fictional rituals from movies, and need not be related to family background; indeed, couples are urged to ‘make up their own traditions.’ Costly and trashy doodads are claimed to be mandated, rather than condemned, by etiquette. And wedding guests are not viewed as those to whom hospitality is owed, but as debtors expected to help sponsor their hosts, not only with preselected presents, but, as is often suggested, with cash and payments toward the honeymoon. …

“A deeper cause of their capitulation to commercial demands, Mead posits, is the state of the society itself. Uprooted from tradition, dazzled by celebrity culture and disillusioned about human relationships, Americans are easy prey for those who insinuate that a conspicuous and ‘perfect’ wedding (the industry’s favorite term) — meaning a major production in which they star — is a prerequisite for living happily ever after. That is, presuming that happiness can be found by living above one’s means, discounting family claims, and extorting money and goods from friends.”

Given all this, it would be easy to despair of the institution of marriage. But then I remember the example of my parents. They were married for 36 years, from February 1960 until my father’s death in April 1996.

They were married in a humble little Catholic church in a small town on the central California coast, with Mom’s and Dad’s family and friends looking on. The reception was at a Holiday Inn somewhere close by, and they honeymooned in Yosemite National Park.

Whenever I ask Mom about their wedding, she never mentions the place settings or other accessories. What I hear about is her remembered bliss that day at finally being able to marry the man she loved. Her and my father’s bliss carried them through 36 years of trials, setbacks and the difficult task of raising six children.

Lots of people were quietly inspired by my parents’ enduring love for one another — more than one person has remembered them to me as “that couple that used to walk downtown hand in hand.”

My parents used to say that “A wedding is a day — a marriage is a lifetime.” That seems to be the right perspective.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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