An army dude once told me, “A speech should be like a lady’s skirt: short enough to be interesting, long enough to cover the main points”, and I said, “Wait, can we just clarify what the main points of a lady are – is it her butt or some other, nearby part?”. He pretended not to hear me. Or to be fair, maybe he was a bit deaf and that’s how feminism came to pass him by. Few would disagree with the principle, though – whatever you want to say, keep it brief.
But yesterday I went to a 25th wedding anniversary, where I would have loved for the speeches to be 10 times as long. I could have listened to them all day. The couple looked pretty much exactly the same as they did 25 years ago, which was mysterious and diverting, but that’s not what gave heft to what they said. Rather, whatever endearing thing they said about each another, the quarter century that just flew by was proof that it was real. Comparing it to a wedding speech, it was like the difference between a huckster at a Ted Talk telling you that one day you wouldn’t need to sleep because you’d have a sleep-robot inside your brain, and a real scientist explaining how she’d discovered the cure for cancer.
The sense of destiny fulfilled was contagious – everyone in the room was in exactly the marriage you had always known they would be: other silver milestoners; people who’d been together that long, but resisted the institution, and then caved at the last minute; the ones who were on their second divorce (that was just me – my sister calls me Zo Zo Gabor); the ones who took ages and ages to mate-select. You could have called it all in 2001. Or probably in 1991.
I asked another friend with the same anniversary this year how she and her Mr were going to celebrate, and she said they would probably go to a wetlands centre, or to Ikea, and I said that was unacceptable, unless we were all invited. One couple’s success in the matter of long-range harmony feels, unaccountably, like it belongs to everyone.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
