‘Rekindling my childlike joys’: College students throw fake wedding parties
This is an unpublished feature I wrote for a class in the spring of 2024.
Everyone rises from their picnic blankets as the bride walks down the grassy aisle. There’s no piano to play a wedding march and certainly no white gown. There is, however, a clip-on veil billowing from the spring breeze and Sanjana Venkatraman’s bouncy step. She smiles brightly as the assembled crowd — two dozen or so college students — hoot and holler like their favorite musician just took center stage.
As she reaches the altar, which is a white sheet hanging from a tree branch with flowers and a cursive “I do” painted on, a heckler’s voice carries above the cheers.
“She’s not good enough for him,” the mother of the groom says.
The mother’s name is Jonas Hattman, a mustachioed young man in jeans and sneakers. He doesn’t really know the bride — or the groom, for that matter — but three months ago, he received a hand drawn save-the-date to the wedding of the spring from his friend Emilie Patrick.
“Who is getting married, you ask?” the invitation said. “Who knows!”
Usually, weddings are the result of months, if not years, of meticulous planning. The bridesmaids and groomsmen are chosen well in advance — and even in a spur-of-the-moment elopement, there’s no question of who the couple is.
Patrick had a different vision of the nuptials.
Her concept was a party based in improv, where guests were assigned wedding roles and given free rein to ad-lib within the structure of the ceremony. While aspects of this party theme are unique — particularly the lack of pre-determined parts — the phenomenon of fake weddings is a trend among college students. Fraternities and sororities orchestrate weddings for their mixers, using the occasion to bridge Greek life organizations. Friends and strangers reenact casual, traditional and cultural weddings — from ceremonies with ordained rabbis to secular backyard bashes like Patrick’s. While these weddings are an opportunity for debauchery, they also provide a return to the childlike wonders of make-believe.
“My roommate and I really love to play-pretend and commit to a bit,” Patrick says. “You know when you’re little and you throw a wedding with your friends? We wanted to do that.”
So, on a sunny Saturday in April, Patrick and roommate Chloe Hall prepare their backyard for a wedding. A sturdy wooden table, usually used for beer pong, holds refreshments from brie cheese and strawberries to Lays potato chips and Coors Light. Another table displays a row of ratty baseball caps with role descriptions next to each for partygoers to sign up for.
“Drunk uncle,” one note reads and advises, “Be drunk.”
Guests arrive in their best florals and button-downs, bearing fruity wine to drink straight from the bottle. Soon enough, the hosts pull everyone together to draw names from the hats and announce who will be playing whom. The chosen members of the wedding party disappear into the house for the bride and groom’s first look at each other.
In the kitchen, Venkatraman is presented with her veil. In a bedroom, groom Tom Welsh is given a wrinkled suit jacket and tie. It’s crookedly hooked around his neck, the short part facing outward, with no intent of fitting into his collared shirt. Before Venkatraman enters the room, he buttons his jacket and smooths the tie behind it, like a nervous kid before a sixth-grade dance.
When they see each other, they embrace. It isn’t hard to pretend to love each other — Venkatraman and Welsh were friends before this, both members of UNC-Chapel Hill’s environmental fraternity, Epsilon Eta.
The wedding party files out of the house, leaving Venkatraman for last. She braves her future mother-in-law’s taunts. The officiant, recent graduate Ken Donny-Clark, is dressed in his olive-toned park ranger uniform and props up his script on a Scrabble box.
“We’re gathered here today in holy matrimony for the wedding of Sanjana and,” Donny-Clark says, “whoever the hell this guy is.”
“Tom!” the crowd says.
“And Tom,” Donny-Clark says.
After their “I do’s” and vows, the couple exchange cherry red ring pops. Welsh can’t resist sneaking in a lick or two as the wedding guests chant like middle schoolers, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” Instead, he and Venkatraman blow air kisses to each other, which satisfies the mob. The couple walk down the aisle, newlyweds. Their friends and family follow suit. Donny-Clark cartwheels away.
All told, it took only five minutes to marry Venkatraman and Welsh.
The reception spreads across the backyard and onto Patrick and Hall’s roof. Hattman — who is done antagonizing his faux daughter-in-law, for now — passes around cigarettes and a hot pink BIC lighter. The partiers on the ground dance Ring-Around-the-Rosie style. These moments are punctuated by reminders that this is still a wedding.
Venkatraman and Welsh have their first dance where she spins him into a dip.
They cut a small, white, circular cake and divvy the pieces onto napkins, shoving them around to anyone in reach.
Groomsmen and bridesmaids give speeches.
“Tom and I have been friends since we were 5 years old,” Bella Jansson, best man, says into a Bluetooth microphone. “We’ve seen each other through thick and thin, through all the AP classes and girlfriends.”
She pauses.
“I wish he married his last girlfriend, who I liked.”
Cries of disapproval ring out.
“She doesn’t mean that,” insists the drunk uncle.
Later, chatting with Welsh and Donny-Clark, Jansson drops the pretense.
“Tom and I kind of know each other,” she says, then turns to him. “We should interact more. From what I’ve learned about you, Tom, I love you.”
Georgeanna Randall, another groomsman, has also displayed her love for Welsh throughout the afternoon, silencing the naysayers. In her speech, she divulges Welsh’s struggles in college before meeting Venkatraman, who saved him from an aimless life.
“I’ve never met any of these people before in my life,” she says. “Except for Emilie. I don’t even go to this school.”
Patrick, the great connector of this gathering who armed herself with Cupid’s bow, thinks the secret to a good party lies in the theme. There’s no shortage of themed house parties in Chapel Hill, from Patrick’s Berghain party last semester — styled after a German nightclub — to a “Dress as Your Ex” party thrown a few streets over.
All of these parties revel in the urge to play dress-up. College students, standing on the precipice of adolescence and adulthood, once again become kids rooting around in a grown-up’s closet for too-big heels. The spring wedding extends the premise, playing make-believe on a homemade stage. The grape juice has turned to wine and the princess dresses have shortened their hems, but the core of it remains the same. Twenty-something-year-olds escape — even if just for the weekend — back to the magic of their youth.
“My years in college have been me rekindling my childlike joys,” Patrick says. “I think college is the first time you’re removed from those adolescent years of feeling judged for having fun. Instead, you’re left to your own devices and friends. You can do whatever you want.”