Most eyes at a wedding are on the couple-of-the-hour as they wander through their gantlet of marriage motions – the traded vows, the orchestrated cake-cutting, the first dance.
Some guests, however, spend that time watching one another instead.
They’re single – usually – and they’re looking for love.
“It’s sort of like the best blind-date environment ever,” says Denver Realtor Nancy Levine, 40, who is single. “It’s a good, fun group of people that you are hanging out with for a weekend and really getting to know.”
The idea of wedding-as-matchmaker fueled the 1994 hit “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” and it positively hatched “Wedding Crashers,” a new summer movie that’s opening with a serious buzz.
With a tag line of “Hide your bridesmaids,” it’s a tale of two buddies sharing a hobby of crashing weddings in search of willing women. With the booze flowing and the guests in a romantic fervor, these guys-on-the-make aim to be in the wrong place at just the right time.
Crashing weddings goes too far, says Denver bachelor Henry Schloss, 31, who owns a commercial printing company.
But the right wedding, he says, can create “a good playing field.”
“It’s definitely better than going out at night,” he says. “But the people at the wedding have to be people like yourself. If you are going to go out and get after it, you want to find an event that is your cup of tea, with your kind of people.”
Schloss says when he was in his early- and mid-20s, he “got all jazzed” about the wedding season.
“It would be like a big frat party,” he says.
Now that he’s in his 30s, weddings involve more couples and fewer singles.
The thrill is gone.
The idea that single people at weddings would meet, date and even fall in love should surprise nobody, says Josh Hanfling, 38, the bachelor-owner of Qube Visual in Denver.
“You are looking your best, the guys are in tuxedos, the women have pedicures and are wearing a dress,” he says. “It’s a protected party environment. You don’t have to worry about DUIs or people you don’t know. You aren’t paying for anything. You are in this comfortable space. A band is there. All of the important elements are there. The atmosphere is set.”
Hanfling says he knows guys “whose only mission” is to conjure a fling out of a wedding. He’s observed it many times: Two people meet at a wedding, they flirt, they get together at night.
And then, he says, “they kiss goodbye at brunch, and that’s that.”
Hanfling never has gotten lucky, he says. Schloss has.
Several relationships grew out of weddings for Levine, but they didn’t last long.
“Usually it doesn’t work out because 90 percent of the time you are going somewhere for a wedding,” she says. “Long-distance relationships come out of weddings. That’s the negative part of it. It tends to be someone from another state.”
Maybe it had something to do with being from the same state. In any case, Alison Cross met her husband at a wedding six years ago, and the couple got hitched three years later.
“I think we had a good opportunity to spend time with each other at the wedding,” says Cross, 26, who lives in Erie. “At a bar you’re with other friends, drinking and dancing. But at the wedding we were truly set up. There was romance in the air, watching two people in love commit their lives to each other. It was easier to feel attraction.”
It wasn’t just any wedding. It was her brother’s event, and Cross was a bridesmaid. The man she met at the wedding, Jed Cross, 27, was the brother of the bride, and a groomsman.
“We got paired to walk down the aisle together,” says Alison Cross. “At the reception he asked me to go out on a date that night, and of course I said yes. He freaked out for a moment and ran over and asked for my brother’s permission.”
Weddings do launch relationships, and it’s not always coincidence that underlies the coupling, says Rosanna McCollough, editor-in-chief of
Weddingchannel.com.
“That’s the entire art of the seating arrangements,” she says. “You as the bride and groom are trying to put together a seating chart where people who like each other, or may have things in common, are seated together, and people who do not like each other are sitting as far away as possible.”
Weddings, she says, have “all the right ingredients for the recipe, if the recipe is to meet someone.”
John Tobey, the chief executive officer of Eventeur, a high-end Denver event-planning firm, stages three or four weddings a month during wedding season, describing them as “a lot like a theater or Broadway production. You have a lot of different story lines going on.”
The guest list, he says, “is a political situation” where the bride and groom “are scheming, they are creating a cast of characters for their production. And people bring chemistry into it.”
The younger the bride and groom, the riper the event is for romance, Tobey says.
Levine, who typically hits about five weddings a year, understands.
While she says wedding coupling is “very common,” it was more of a big deal when she was younger.
“The post-college weddings are the wildest,” she says. “More of a
melee.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
