Why You Should Bring Sunglasses to Your Wedding

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Well, this is it, I guess. What started as a series of un-furtive, semi-intellectual, vaguely thematic exchanges between relative strangers has totally....well, stayed that way. Yet it has been anything but a zero sum game. No, I have learned that I lack two of the three essential qualities necessary to date Elizabeth Wurtzel and Elizabeth Wurtzel, in short order will, if there is a Christ in Heaven, receive a $60,000 purse.

I can’t answer your last questions, because if I do, it will mean I will be telling you things I haven’t even told my wife. And I read somewhere, perhaps in a magazine, or in a manual of some sort, that this is wrong.

All I will say is this: For the better part of my existence I was convinced I would not get married. Even when I got engaged and planned an entire wedding, it still didn’t feel real. I observed it from outside my body. Outside my element even.

I basically snorkeled through the entire process, feeling nothing, until the moment I walked up the stairs with my father to the place where the ceremony was happening. It was just he and I. And then I just started crying. Like, hard. Not from joy, nor sadness. Momentousness hit me with one giant punch – the kind that knocks the wind out of you and makes you think you will never get it back. It was a bright day in May, so I was able to hide behind sunglasses. But I truly worried I would not be able to stop crying. Not before the ceremony, nor ever. That was the best day of my life.

Ben