GAY OLD TIMES.(Brief Article)

When the Times announced, this month, that its Sunday Weddings pages are to shed their staid, heterosexual identity and come out, transformed, as the Weddings/Celebrations pages, sparkling with accounts of the quasi-nuptials of gay and lesbian couples, it was rightly understood to be a matter of some moment. The Times' wedding pages, as has often been remarked, serve as an unofficial cultural index: once chronicling only the inbreeding of the Wasp aristocracy--noting the happy couple's lineage, club memberships, charity affiliations, and couturier--the pages have increasingly come to cover the weddings of formerly overlooked demographics, like Jews and blacks, sometimes even showing them marrying each other. Inviting gay couples to the party must have seemed, to the Times, inevitable, and, while the newspaper is doubtless motivated by the lofty goal of inclusion, its editors surely hope that some of their new celebrants' party-throwing skills will contribute to the entertainment value of the page.

Though little noted at the time, the really significant change in the Times wedding pages took place a couple of years ago, on February 13, 2000. It was on this eve of Valentine's Day that the newspaper started running wedding announcements that included not only each marital merger's raw data--academic achievements, parental occupations, name of officiant--but, in some cases, an account of the couple's path to matrimony. Thus readers learned that Pamela Carrington, a retail executive, and Harry T. Edwards, a federal appeals-court judge, first struck up a conversation while in a holding pattern over LaGuardia Airport, and that romance bloomed in spite of the fact that, as the bride told the Times, "he had no idea what Barneys was!" The paper also reported that day that Willa Jane Bernstein, an assistant New York state attorney general, and Daniel William Braz, a Merrill Lynch investment banker, met at a singles' dinner-dance at the New York Athletic Club, and that within a few months Mr. Braz had devised a computer program for Ms. Bernstein, "with rows and columns labeled Baby 1, Baby 2, Private School, and so forth." ("That freaked me out a little bit, but it was also alluring," she recalled.) Modelled on the popular "Vows" column, which has, each week since 1992, taken a particularly felicitous coupling and turned it into a soft-news story, these wedding announcements were courtship narratives in miniature, each, like a Jane Austen novel, ending at the moment when married life begins.

The wedding announcement as love story is of a piece with the popular understanding that marriage is primarily a romance rather than, as has historically been the case, a pragmatic contractual arrangement sanctioned by a larger community. This is no surprise, since those earlier characteristics of marriage have ...