All the Weddings You're Going to Attend in Your Twenties

You are somewhere between the ages of 22 and 26 years old, and it is February, the romance month, verging on the cusp of spring, the horny season, and there is a flump-ing sound at the door. Check the post: behold the pile. Something curious about it, today, isn’t there?

As you sift through the usual stack of takeaway leaflets and the previous tenant's Nectar vouchers, it becomes clear what’s wrong: you come across a big thick cream envelope, actually addressed to you, with your full name written out on the front of it in calligraphy. As you open it, a load of gold glitter falls out and instantly gets buried in the carpet. It has happened. The horrible thing has happened. You, a mere child, have been invited to the real life wedding of one of your peers.

This is the first wedding of your twenties. Here are all the rest you’ll end up going to.

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It's the summer after your first year at university. You're back at your parents' house and have thus far spent most of your time sending "Miss u loads xoxoxo" Snapchats to your uni mates from the toilet cubicles of various hometown Wetherspoon's and lying when your mum comes home and asks you how many jobs you applied for that day.

The only person you know who's responsible enough to tie the knot is that religious kid from your school year, who has invited you and your group to their Baptist church wedding because a) your name was next to hers on the register so you sat together every lesson for five years straight; and b) your mums sort of know each other from PTA. You dig out your Year 13 prom dress and awkwardly join an enthusiastic chorus of How Great Thou Art from your back row seat in church, and think how much cooler you are than these nerds. I’ve been to the Goldsmiths Student Union, you think at these people. You idiots have barely left Bedfordshire.

Sad news is: other than half a glass of prosecco for the toast, the reception is completely dry, so you’re forced to sneak off to the hotel bar once an hour to buy £8 double-vodka mixers that you can pretend are just Diet Coke. But they are not Diet Coke, are they. They are just enough alcohol to give you a big headache but not enough alcohol to get drunk. Mum drives you home and the happy couple announces their pregnancy 12 weeks to the day after the event.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? No, don’t tell me: it’s some sort of £7-an-hour catering job you did for two weeks when you were 20, serving braised beef to Tories in the ballroom of a fancy hotel. One of those jobs where they make you get two buses into town before your first day in order to buy a very specific and ugly pair of regulation shoes from Shoe Zone, and you have to turn up half an hour early to each four-hour shift because they overbook you and the last two people to arrive get sent home. Is was that, wasn’t it? And the worst shift you ever did – the worst shift anyone ever does, the one where you decided you would just live off cereal for a couple of weeks because anything is better than putting yourself through this hell – that worst shift was definitely a wedding.

Four separate uncles try to either shag you or tap you up for gear, and a tight-faced manager gets furious at you when he sees you eyeballing a glass of white wine instead of measuring it out like you were trained to. You don’t get home until 4AM, somehow. Never go back.

After planning her wedding for literally half a decade, your sixth form friend is finally getting married. This is fine: she already owns a house with her "other half", who is either some nerdy kid from school who did a very understated, matter-of-fact glow-up the second you got your A-Level results and is now extremely hench, or a six-foot five lad she met on a night out, who works in the emergency services and has never, to your knowledge, spoken a single word unprompted, except for shouting "Dickhead!" at the football one time when she invited you to the pub to show you 12 different Pinterest mood boards and tell you about their cake tasting. The day itself is astonishingly perfect, and you hate her.

Their first conversation was about their choice of A-Levels, and yet they still somehow found each other so interesting that they talked all night in the shared kitchen, ignoring the riotous game of Never Have I Ever going on around them, and now they’ve been together for eight years, through dozens of bad haircuts and honestly just shit taste in music, and are ready to commit to a lifetime of being inoffensively boring together until one of them dies. You get genuinely quite emotional during the speeches and have a proper catch up with Chris, the best man, who you haven’t seen since graduation, and— yeah. Didn’t… didn’t everyone else from your year do well for themselves, hmm? Didn’t they all… do really, really well. Don’t tell them you’re still temping. Don’t tell them about the time you sued Deliveroo. Just… let them think you’re thriving.

Your girlfriend’s colleague has invited her to the evening bit, and she’s got a +1, which means you have to pose for 20 minutes outside her parents' front door while her mum takes pictures of you on her camera, then on your girlfriend’s phone, then on her own phone, which she doesn’t know how to use properly. Weddings are just prom for adults, aren’t they? Still: no skin in the game means no consequences for you, which means you can go double-hard on the complementary prosecco and chat absolute wham to everyone at the table around you, because there’s no way you’re ever seeing these fuckers again, not ever in a thousand million years.

When Isabella heard about Prince Harry’s engagement she threatened to dump her personal trainer-slash-boyfriend if he didn’t immediately pop the question so they could get married in the same year, and she has three different Google alerts set up so she can replicate Meghan Markle’s every outfit. Isabella’s hen party is a week at her parent’s Tuscan farmhouse, and the wedding itself is at a sprawling country estate that you can only get to via two trains and a £40 taxi, so you have no option but to blow £200 on a hotel room for the night. You have to extend your overdraft again and become a social recluse for the rest of the summer to afford it all. Worth it, though, for the Instagram opportunities. They have a flower wall! Think how good the pictures of you in front of that will look on Tinder!

It’s probably best we don’t talk about this one, because there’s a 90 percent chance they’re going to quietly divorce within a year, and he’s going to move back to New Zealand, and he doesn’t even have Facebook so they will literally never speak again. Whole weird section where his groomsmen carry him down the aisle on a surfboard. Custom vows that mention reiki, for some reason. Vegan cake. No.

I honestly think that one of the reasons gay marriage took so long to happen was because the straights were just scared of the competition, and lo and behold, you find yourself in heaven: when these two first met, marriage wasn’t legally an option for them, so you can be damn sure they’re going have an open bar about it now. The food is insanely good, at one point the DJ just plays the whole of Lemonade, and there isn’t even one homophobic elderly relative in sight because it’s 2018 and you don’t have to invite them anyway! Love! Is! Great!

It’s 8.30AM on your big cousin's big day and your mum is having the first of eight panic attacks because she’s laddered her only pair of flesh-coloured tights and forgot to put her camera battery on charge overnight. There is a full-blown family feud minutes before the taxi arrives because your little brother refuses to wear sensible shoes with his suit, instead opting for an undone tie and a pair of Reebok Classics. Your dad gets absolutely wasted at the reception and your grandma falls asleep at the table after two glasses of rosé. Someone you’ve never met before, but who says they knew you as a toddler, says, "When’s it your turn, eh?" The ensuing Instagram story is very, very legendary for you, and about four minutes too long for everyone who follows you.

Oh, there’s always one of these: it’s basically the first wedding you go to when you take the same +1 along as you took to the last wedding you went to, a weird glitch-in-the-Matrix type thing that makes you realise this Tinder shag has somehow been going on for 26 straight months, and fireworks go off in the sky and you see your friends all partnered up gently and giddily around you, and you think: ah, right, I get it now, weddings. Love is a real and beautiful thing. It’s not just an excuse for me to have a piss up and get a free chicken dinner. Then you try to get phone signal, which you obviously fucking can’t because you’re in the middle of nowhere in a marquee, and the fleeting happiness you had is gone again. Fuck weddings.

Nah, mate, no. Come on. No. Your twenties are for blowing your hard-earned cash on 3AM Ubers and hungover Dominos, not handmade wedding favours and personalised confetti. Come back when you’re 30. We can talk about your weird little feelings then.

@RosieHew