Please Stop Getting Married At The Pyramids

Somewhere along the way, a certain kind of person decided that no occasion is truly real until it has been made inaccessible to everyone else. The wedding, we are told in very serious tones, is an expression of love — but love is no longer content with a church and a few relatives, and now requires a monument, a continent, and the temporary exclusion of the rest of the human race.

I had a small demonstration of this last week.

A man I've never met wrote to propose, as a subject worthy of coverage, his own wedding. Its distinction, he explained, was that he had managed to shut down the Pyramids of Giza for the evening — the first of his countrymen to do it, he noted, and only the third couple in history. He offered this the way one offers a public service, apparently convinced that closing a wonder of the ancient world to the people of the earth was the most admirable thing about his marriage. In a sense he was right. It was certainly the most expensive, who am I take it away from this ex-JP Morgan employee? 

But let’s be honest for a second here. What he'd bought wasn't beauty. The Pyramids are reliably beautiful, and have been so, free of charge, to every traveller for some forty-five centuries.

Instead, what he'd bought was exclusion. The whole pleasure was in the emptiness — in knowing that the ordinary people who had queued in the heat to stand before the oldest tombs on earth were turned away at the gate, so that a livelier party could have the desert to itself. 

And this is where my sympathy, never strong, gives out entirely. These places weren't built to flatter us. They aren't venues; they don't keep a calendar around our convenience. They were old before our grandfathers had names, and they'll be standing, perfectly indifferent, long after the last guest has forgotten whose wedding it even was. To demand that one of them arrange itself prettily behind your décor isn't reverence, whatever the press release says. It's just the oldest vanity in the world, applied to its oldest stones.

So no, I won't be covering the wedding. I'll only point out what most of us figured out a long time ago: that having money and having taste are two completely different things, and that the first, however much of it you spend, has never once managed to pass for the second.